The One Academy

By De Ming

My parents are unique. They never nag at me to do my homework. They never stopped me from going out with friends; in fact I never asked them whether I was allowed to do so. I just did. They never scold me for getting bad results. Does this mean that they do not care? I doubt it.

To my parents, the purpose of going to school was never just to learn about Sejarah and Chemistry, but it was also to learn on how to learn. I guess my parents play by a different set of rules. Principles such as being caring, kind, joyful and having a heart which was willing to serve was their highlight in the process of bringing me up. They also taught me to always be positive, to be analytical, creative and observant. Of course they still wanted me to do well in my studies. So instead of going through the traditional parents-nag-kids phase, my parents would send me to courses and workshops.

Because of all those times where I was sent out alone to an aliened sector, I had started to get used to it and so without me noticing it, I was looking out for courses that interests me. So I found one which was Taylor’s Design Workshop. The speaker was really animated and excited, but the thing that had caught my attention was that our Petronas Twin Tower was worth only 4 billion Ringgit Malaysia, where else Google which is not even a solid object or anything we can touch was worth 80 billion USD! Then he said something that I will always remember. He said that at this age, people are no more paying for solid objects, but ideas!

Today, I joined in the rombongan which was related to design and creativity, it was a course about Digital Art by The One Academy. We arrived at The One Academy at approximately nine in the morning and we were greeted by Billy who then led us to the art gallery which displayed many of the students’ original art. It was in truth pretty impressive. We were then led to the main block of the building and Billy shared with us the facilities that they provided. What fascinated me the most was the pictures they hung on the wall, especially the ones on advertisement or posters for awareness. Each one of those pictures stood out to me because within that creative outlook of it laid a glaring message.

We went into a room then and we watched a couple of videos, while one of the facilitators promoted The One Academy. Did you know that the transformer sports people in Astro are designed by a graduate of The One Academy? They started on the real thing after the introduction and advertisement, and Billy then asked us to solve a couple of challenges which involves using our right brain and he thus concluded that we should always think out of the box.

A nasi lemak lunch was provided after that.

We came back into the room and after announcing the winners of the designing the beak competition, we head off towards the bus and back to school.

Overall, most people felt cheated as they learned nothing about digital art, but for me this experienced had taught me to appreciate the creativeness of the many pictures and designs, but most of all, the delicate message behind it.

There was only one problem though.