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Scriptwriters must already be used to seeing their works on screen,
whether they write for television or film, especially the veterans
who have been writing for a long time. Of course this is applicable
to those writers whose works actually made it to production. But
then again, that’s another discourse altogether.
For this writer, I am not yet used to seeing my
works on screen. By “used,” I mean being just blasé about it to
the point of not actually caring how the story was visualized at
all. Of course it’s exciting to see because you are curious to
know how the production team, especially the production designer and
the director, visualized the words you just had a mental picture of
before. Now that that mental picture is actually a real picture (and
a moving picture at that), you sometimes wish you wrote several
things differently, or wonder if the production team actually got
the things you wanted to say in your script (oh, the wonderful world
of subtext, semiotics and symbolisms).
But being on the actual set of a world you just
created is another experience altogether. I experienced this weekend
when the TV show I write for called me up to ask if I can sub for
their absent director. Since I have worked with this TV crew before
as a director, I happily obliged and helped.
This show is Happy Land, aired every Saturday at
9:30 a.m. over GMA-7. Since this children’s show began airing in
June of this year, I watched it to monitor how my narrative scripts
are being audio-visually translated. But visiting the set, looking
at the props and meeting the characters I invented (such as the
sari-sari store and its proprietor, which I named after my mother),
I never thought that it would feel differently. All of a sudden, I
am inside the world I created, walking around the places I merely
wrote about at the comfort of my home, and scrutinized the
characters from a great deal of distance. I actually felt like that
writer character from the Cornelia Funke novel Inkheart (which was
also turned into a film) as he reacted upon meeting his fictionally
written characters in the flesh for the first time. It put a weird
but satisfying smile on my face.
But what put an even bigger grin on my face was
seeing how the production team labored over making the material I
wrote come to life. The props, the costumes and of course directing
the scenarios I invented (for this episode, the children
protagonists interact with a young Lam-ang who learned how to talk
respectfully with elders)—they were all fun, and educational for
me, too. Now that I knew how they shot the material, I became
conscious of several factors that I never would have considered
before just by merely writing from a distance.
Well, let’s see how this episode fares, as it
still has to air on October 3. Wish us luck.
Comments? Suggestions? E-mail libay.scribevibe@gmail.com.
She is also at libaycantor.multiply.com.
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