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Project Work Best in Category 5 (Creative Arts): Project Beyond the Counter
Updated: 46 minutes ago
Written by: Ethan Goh Eu Theng, Wu Yanhong (3O3, 2026) and Zhang Hanwen (3P2, 2026)
“Service staff” is a phrase we hear all the time. Schools and community programmes teach us to appreciate the people who help us every day, but when we stopped to think about it, we realised that we barely knew any of them. Most of us knew little more than their names from the occasional greeting. Did we truly know them for who they were?
This was the question that drove Project Beyond the Counter. Through the art of film, we wanted to give students in our school a chance to get to know our service staff better, starting with Kelen, the owner of the noodle stall, and his family.
We kicked things off with unstructured interviews. What began as a few stiff introductory questions slowly turned into casual conversations about his career, family and life. These conversations became the heart of our documentary, allowing us to show students more of the personalities and stories behind the people they see every day.
Of course, the project was far from smooth. Our audio recordings kept failing, so we had to reshoot the interviews multiple times before getting footage we were happy with. Coordinating our schedules with Kelen’s to shoot B-roll footage was also challenging, especially with the school holidays approaching and a month-long gap in our work ahead of us.
At one point, we found ourselves staying up until 3 a.m. editing and planning our interview for the third time, while also dealing with examinations and other commitments. With the final evaluation drawing closer, we became increasingly frustrated at having to repeat seemingly simple tasks because we had overlooked small details.
Looking back, however, those setbacks became some of our biggest learning opportunities. Reshooting gave us the chance to rewatch our footage and rethink how we could make the interviews feel more natural and human. It also led us to include Kelen’s family in the film, which became one of its most well-received segments.
The tight timeline also pushed us to abandon our planned shot list and adopt a more guerrilla-style approach to filmmaking, with us sometimes filming individually instead. This drew less attention from our subjects and helped the footage feel more candid and immersive.
As the project comes to an end, we are left with lessons we did not expect to take away. Redoing tasks that felt tedious, such as reshooting interviews and rechecking audio, pushed us out of our comfort zones. Every small mistake had a cost, and we learnt to take responsibility for these mistakes instead of brushing them aside.
We had also never experienced the pressure of making a film that mattered to someone beyond ourselves. There were frustrating and exhausting days, but we pushed through them, and we are proud of what we created.
The biggest change, however, has been in how we see the people who serve us. Interactions at the noodle stall used to be simple: order, collect and leave. Now, we chat with Kelen about our studies and examinations, while he tells us about his own life and what he has noticed around the school.
People like him are everywhere, yet we rarely make the effort to learn more about them. That is what we hope our film shows other students: the people behind the counter have stories just as interesting as ours, and getting to know them can begin with something as simple as a conversation.
Watch the full documentary below and get to know Kelen and his family beyond the counter. We hope you enjoy the film as much as we enjoyed bringing their stories to life.
