WORK AS PLAY

I had a meeting with one of my clients for a corporate AVP the other day. This was one of the few times that I'm actually excited to meet up for a creative brief. Usually, even though I'm the director, I am always at the end of the creative line because it's usually the agency that has the last say and the creative control. Except for this one, I actually get to choose my scriptwriter and technically come up with a concept.

This group was also the same people who got me to do a mining documentary in Zamboanga last January. This is a fun agency because they really try to push ideas out of the box from their creative group to really come up with interesting AVP's. Take for example the mining AVP, instead of your regular run-of-the-mill-with-lots-of-talking-heads, they decided to concentrate on the mining process per se. The treatment was mala National Geographic's, and they gave me four days to shoot the whole lot which was actually a luxury for other productions.

It was great that I got to really immerse myself with the local mining community, got to get first hand experience on how it is to live in their environment and get to talk with the locals which incidentally were mostly members of a local mountain tribe. Our nights were spent up in the mountains, with the tribesmen indulging us with their local dance set around a bonfire. It was a great experience to behold and the set-up was just cinematic. We had a grand time filming them.

This time, we're going to capture a whole new environment. And I'm very excited. The environment does not exist anymore but we're going to try to recreate it to capture the grand era that was long forgotten. We're doing a docu-drama of the Carillon bells in UP. And since its heydays were during the early 60's, we’ve decided to dedicate a segment reliving the nostalgia of those days. What was it like to be a student during the early 60's, in U.P.? How did the bells (sadly not working any more) affect the lives of the students who daily got to hear its haunting sounds?

The docu-drama will be done to promote awareness for the National Artist Nakpil designed bell tower. And hopefully it will gain enough support for institutions to actually restore the bells, which is not just a landmark but also a sense of national pride to us all.

It's one of the few projects that I'm really excited to do because with these types, I'm not just a media whore but I'm actually doing something with a cause, things that really do matter. Hehe… I've just finished meeting my scriptwriter and we had a fun time brainstorming. I've even collated a number of pictures of Manila during the 60's from the net to come up with my visual treatment.

THE WAY THEY WERE...






This is no work. This is fun!