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The modern parenting techniques involve an unprecedented amount of extra-curricular activities that intend to provide children with an advantage over their peers. As in most other Asian countries, Singapore is guilty of a culture where parents’ high expectations of their children lead to excessive extra-curricular commitments.

The structure of the narrative is linear — the voice-over of a diary entry that a girl writes regarding the pressure she is feeling — but we represent this pressure, due to expectations that her parents impose on her, through a series of non-linear rhythmic montage. The shots focus on the paradigms of extra-curricular activities in her exposition, such as ballet, violin lessons and the social life she is missing out on due to those commitments.

Each shot is varied in length, beginning with longer, more contemplative shots to faster shots of the same activities. The crescendo of intensity supports our belief that pressure and its ultimate release is a slow and nefarious process that may transcend into explosion when it is pent up for too long.

The jump cuts serve as a disorienting effect to portray the jarring discomfort of having too many activities to juggle. Along with the rhythmic montage sequence, they combine to form a dialectical effect of culmination.

The mise-en-scène is carefully deliberated to convey the mental state of the girl as she pens her entry.

Hard key lighting is used to isolate the girl to accentuate the idea of loneliness and lack of socialising opportunities with her friends. The facelessness of the girl constitutes the loss of identity which allows personal projection. Close-ups and extreme close-ups give a claustrophobic feeling, and in these indexical shots we see the objects that represent the source of her stress, like ballet shoes and the violin. Altogether, they depict the oppressive quality of parents’ high expectations on their children.