The Day of the Fellowship - A Photo Blog

There were 8 of us from Singapore but Pambudi and his friend had their own transportation and arrived at the convention themselves. This is us just got off the bus from Genting waiting for Sukyi and David Lai to pick us up from Sentral Bus Station. Sukyi arrived 1st and later we met David and Samuel at MacDonalds.

I’ve met Sukyi previously when she came to SG so that wasn’t a problem. I recognised David immediately when he arrived even thou we’ve never met him before because of the many newspaper articles that were posted in the MMF forums with full blown up photos of him. Samuel as a little surprise because he was wearing specs and was fairer than his avatar in the forum. Meeting everyone from MMF was a most interesting experience. I feel like I know everyone so well yet I am meeting everyone for the 1st time.

Anyways, after David and Samuel arrived, they drove us to check into our hotel which was on the way to the convention.

Ning, Huron and Fuming took Sukyi’s car and me and the rest took David’s car. That is David’s car in the background in front of our hotel.

It was a nice chat along the way and we had some great laughs at Sukyi’s driving antics. Not that she is a bad driver of course. She just drives…. erm….. very confidently.

This is the hotel that David got for us, The Summit Hotel. He also got us special discounted rates for it. It was a very nice and comfortable hotel with big bathrooms and a nice big bathtub, much better than the Genting one we stayed in. But we didn’t really see much of the inside for it coz we were out virtually the whole day.

We went straight to the MMF Convention after checking in, and everyone was already waiting for us. We ended up starting about 1 hour late.

Kicking off the convention, was Brendan’s speech, where he talked about the Mickey Mouse Club and how far MMF has grown from the support of everyone. It was nice and short and sweet.  

I was the next to speak. I mostly did acknowledgements and thank yous for all the people involved in making the convention possible. I was also hiding a barbed wire club behind my back ready to whack anyone who laughs at my weird voice.

Beside me is Kam the moderator and also the emcee for the day. It was funny when I met Kam, coz for some weird reason, i always envisioned him to be someone older and on the plump side, don’t ask me how I got that impression.
But he turned out to be a dashing young man with an accent the girls loved.

The performances starts after that, I was distracted now and then so I hope I took a photo of everyone’s performances. If anyone’s performances isn’t in here, don’t worry, Brendan has more photos for everyone later.  

This is Lai doing his linking rings which went down very well with everyone. On top of the standard Shoot Ogawa’s moves, Lai actually came up with a few kiler moves and variations of his own. The most impressive to me was the one where he twirled the ring on his finger and then did a silent link. Woah.  

This is Charleston (spelling?) doing his card manipulation act. It was a silent act done to music.

A lot of the people performing actually took their performances very seriously which was a very impressive attitude to me. Charleston dressed up for the part and bought his own music for the act.  

I’m sorry, I wasn’t there when this photo was taken, Fuming was helping me with the photo taking for some parts.
Can someone post a comment about what act this is?

Edit: Thanks Jeff for the information. This photo is Darren doing his cards revelations routine.

Jeff Gan the moderator was up next. Jeff Gan is the Chief Coordinator for this Convention and everyone recognises the tremendeous effort he put into this.

This is him doing Banechek’s effect. His Magic of the Wind gag got everyone rolling on the floor. We could all tell he was kinda nervous and he tried to escape with only one effect but no such luck. The crowd was chanting for more and he had to come back front to do….

A book test. I actually forgot what book test he did but it went down pretty well.  

Next up, Baalan! In a nice pink shirt and jacket get-up. Ning told me later that she thought Balaan was the best dressed for the day and that he should be a moderator because he is cute. She has strange ideas sometimes.:D

Baalan did a KINDA mentalism effect. I don’t recognise it but it makes me think of Luke Jermay so it might be from Jermay’s material.
Baalan made his own pulse slow down and finally stopped. Then he made David’s pulse stopped too.  It was one of the most interesting performances for me because I haven’t seem much NLP stuff done before.

This is the watching crowd from the side of the room. There are people standing of thee sides of the room and in the adjacent rooms. Next up Samuel Chong.

Samuel seems like such a serious guy in the forums but he is a real funny and lively guy in real life. He did a 3 card monte effect with bent corner finale. This is the people crowding around him as he asked everyone to come to the front to take a better look.

Edit: Sorry, I lied. Samuel’s act was a multiple phrase 3 card monte routine with bent corner as the 2nd last phrase. The finale was actually a colour change of all 3 cards. Shocking effect it is.

This the the view from the other side of the room.

The turn out for the event was fantastic, we could barely fit everyone in the room. Next time round, we might have to find a bigger room so that even more people can come.

Kevin with his cups and balls was up next.

I love the fact that there are so many variation of performances for the day and it wasn’t just concentrated on cards which are the hobbists fav.

After this was lunch. I was at the Mod’s meeting so I didn’t take a photo of the food. It was really quite a spread, with satay and pizza and all kinds of finger food. There was a lot of impromptu jamming and performances during the break too which I hope at least someone took some photos of.

After that, was Pambudi’s performances and lecture.

Pambudi’s performance went down very well with everyone and had everyone rolling with laughter many times. There was minor glitches with 2 effects that he did but he recovered without any difficulties.
From talking to everyone later, Pambudi’s performance was one of the most memorable of the day. After the performances, Pambudi went to to give a lecture on his performance. He talked about the finer aspect of performances and explained the methods of the effects he just performed. It again went down very well with the people.
I was too distracted by the lecture and forgot to take any photos of Pambudi lecturing. Maybe someone has got some. After Pambudi’s lecture, there’s a short break before we go into the 2nd round of performances.

This is Brendan doing an couple of card effects.

Issac was everyone’s fav volunteer that day. He must have been used as a volunteer for at least 4 - 5 times, thanks to his strategic seating right in front.

This is Issac volunteering for Jack’s performance too.

Jack didn’t really have enough to eat during lunch and he took a big bite off the cards he was using. I tried to take a photo of the finale where the deck had a big mouthful missing from it but that didn’t turn out well. Again, wait for the others to share their photos for it.

And the last performance was by David Lai. I actually snapped a lot more photos of him than this but for some reasons, whenever the camera shutters went off, i would catch him with a funny/awkward posture or expression, or his head will be turn or it will come out blur. This was the best one that came out…. His mentalism was just too strong and affected the electronics of the camera i think.

After this was James Tong’s lecture. The thing about me is when the lectures starts, i forgot all about phototaking. So I forgot to take photos of Jame’s lecture too. But i know his assistant was taking plenty of photos from the side of the room so we’ll just have to wait for James to share the pics. James gave an insightful lecture on the business aspect of doing magic professionally and shared many of his thoughts and experience on the matter. He also did a card fanning demostration with a deck of very vintage fanning cards with some very fancy fans, some of which are his own creations, which impressed everyone very much.

There was also a group photo of everyone at the end of the official gathering. My camera’s lenses were not wide enough to take in everyone so we relied of James Tong’s assistant’s camera which had a wide lense. We’ll have to wait for that for sharing later.

After that, it’s off the The Magic Theater Restuarant! Wee, the general manager of the restuarant was also at the meeting and he arranged for a table booking for everyone right in front of the stage for us. We went seperately in different cars, and some of the guys were staying back in Jame’s office jamming a little and arrived later than expected.  

Almost everyone who went for the convention went for the dinner. You can see how long our table was and we were really packing the front part of the resturant.

We quickly got down to the business of stuffing down our dinners. They have colourful drinks with pretty names at the MTR.

Pambudi was to be a special guest performer at the MTR that night. The resident performer, Robin did an opening balloon swallowing act before introducing Pambudi on-stage. I tried to snap a few photos of Robin’s act but it came out of focused. So…..wait for the others.

Next was Pambudi. He did a routine that was different from the ones he performed and lectured and it was pretty well received. I was looking around the restuarant during the performance and saw that there were no conversations happening and everyone’s eyes were riverted to the stage. Maybe it has something to do with Pambudi’s hypnotic shirt.

This is Pambudi hynotising the crowd with his shirt. We are seated right in front of the stage.

This is Pambudi working a volunteer from the restuarant.

And this is Pambudi doing his victory dance after his show. He was going to break out into a song too but the applause drown him out. But his act really was well received not just by our own pple but by all the patrons of the restuarant as well.

By this time, almost everyone had finished their dinner and the sessioning begin. My gosh, when you have a bunch of magicians together, there’s just no stopping them. There were so many little groups going on it wasn’t funny. I could only shoot some random pictures every now and then when I remember.

This is Ning stealing Huron’s Joe Poper card clip while he was distracted with his cards.

And they sessioned….

….And they jammed…

….And they magic-ed the night away.

I saw a lot of filming in progress for lotsa clips so look out for them in the coming months in the forums.

And this is meeting Brendan again after more than 1 year when he came to Singapore for the SMC magic competition. 

Meeting Jack whose videos has always had my eyes popping out of their sockets. 

And meeting Issac, MMF’s favourite stooge.  

Ning getting entertained

And the jamming continued….

We were so loud and noisy that we pretty much had the attention of most of the tables. At some point, the guys suddenly decided to urge Lai to do an effect for the adjacent table. After some chanting we finally got him to start and  did that got him on a roll.

He started with a card effect and tried to end it off there. But there’s no escaping. With some more chants of “We want more”, he got his set of the linking rings stuffed into his hands. 

He started his linking rings routine and man, the cheers that was going off, it might as well have been the World Cup Finals. By this time we have the attention of the whole resturants, even the patrons upstairs who were trying to see his performances.

It went so well that some diners on the upper floors requested for Lai to go up to their table which he finally did.

We don’t know what he did up there but whatever he was doing, it was good, because we could hear the girls screams and cheers coming from upstairs every now and then which also triggered a big round of cheering downstairs. Or maybe Lai was doing a different kind of magic to the girls.

The Sistas of Magic! Notice the uncanny resemblence of Ning and Sukyi, especially the horns growing out of their heads. The girls were virtually inseperatable the whole night. 

This is Pambudi and Wee, the general manager of the restuarant.

And the magic went on….

Even when the live music was going on.

…and it went on. By the time we are finally done, it was already close to 1 am.

I understand that some of the guys went off for supper and EVEN MORE jamming (Yes, they jammed from dinner all the way to supper and jammed somemore). I heard that went on to REALLY late too.

The SG guys, minus Pambudi and his friend who went back to the hotel, decided to check out the clubbing scene. So off we went with Sukyi and David as our guide and drivers.
We were actually planning to go to Zouk KL but we end up in Velvet Underground instead.
And yes, all of us went in, even 17 year old Fuming.

We had a pretty wild time in there but the details of the night is only for those who were there to remember.

Let’s just say we all had LOTSA fun.

Yes, i know this is a photo of Zouk, not Velvet Underground. But I snapped this photo after we finally left Velvet at like 3:30 am and I was walking 1/2 way to the car when I decided to take a photo but I was too tired to walk back to take velvet’s front door. But anyways, this is just proof that we were there.:)

And thus conclude this extremely long entry!