The Progress Report

The quick n’ dirty job for an advertising firm; done.

The children’s comic; part five has been finished and part 6 has been started, meaning that I’m officially cruising into the half-way mark with it. It’s also suddenly subject to a name change, so even if I could talk about it by name (Which I can’t just yet) I don’t even know what to call it anymore. Apparently the reason the name change has suddenly come up is because it occurred to someone over at the publishers that there may be pronunciation problems for those young, undeveloped palettes that are targetted to read it.

I don’t know if this is particular to Singapore alone or if this is just a general, generic management problem, but it’s becoming abundantly clear to me that the people who are charge of making creative decisions in Singapore are, creatively, idiots.

Or at the very least, they simply do not pay any attention, nor show an interest in a product being developed for them until they are SURE that the development of said product has passed the point of no return. It’s like they mark on their production calendar the date that changes or corrections can no longer be easily made with little fuss, but are now guaranteed to be painful and potentially damaging to the project’s final outcome.

It’s not just this kiddie comic that has had me thinking this, I’ve been exposed to some other horror stories of late that have merely confirmed this theory. Like whileI found out that the show I wrote for last year while getting married, 9 Lives apparently sort crashed and burned towards the end and that was because at some point in the middle of EDITING, the broadcasters suddenly decided that it was a bad idea to have smoking appear in a local television program and so asked that all footage containing people smoking be removed. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Unfortunately since one particular episode had a main character suffer through his crisis by nervously chain smoking, so this move more or less gutted the entire episode of its “A story” which meant that the last minute edit job of cannibalizing other shots that didn’t show cigarettes rendered the episode incomprehensible. There are other stories of course, but the upshot of it is, people that commission creative projects in Singapore have a bad, bad, BAD habit of saying yes to something, letting the creative types go to town on it, and THEN change their mind only at the 3/4 mark when they can inflict maximum damage on the project. I’ve heard the mournful question again and again over the years from writers, artists, actors, you name it, but always a variation on the same theme, “Why… WHY did they say yes to it when they didn’t like it in the FIRST PLACE??!”

I guess this is their revenge on creative people for being able to do something they can’t, or something, but I keep seeing this again, and again…