Five weeks ago, I blogged about the Channel 8 drama The Dream Makers. The final episode was aired last night with a logical ending of Jason Lam sticking with Fang Tonglin. If Jeanette Aw's fans had their way, the story would be in a total mess.
Jason dumping Tonglin and going back to Zhao Fei'er? Mediacorp took a big risk by allowing viewers to decide the ending but at least most of the neutrals voted using their brains. Or maybe one actress is just more lovable than the other.
As the result of how the ending should be is made known, we can turn our attention to focus on the entire production. Many would agree that The Dream Makers was a decent piece of work by Mediacorp. I will not disagree but there are still some parts which are worth improving on.
Other than Jack Neo's movies where the characters only dine at Old Town White Coffee, I have yet to come across a local production that is full of commercialism. No Channel 8 drama was filmed so unnaturally with sponsors' products in the audience's faces until The Dream Makers.
The drama had quite a number of sponsors and it is understandable that the director had to include scenes featuring the products in order to appease the companies which supported the production. Having your sponsor's product in your show is alright but advertising them so blatantly just diminishes the artistic value of the film.
The characters, whether young or old, will choose to eat at Subway and even call for its delivery service. Then, it seems that the more mature ones are addicted to Thomson Osteogard capsules. However, the most prominent of them all has to be Pokka Green Tea.
Throughout the show, I don't remember watching a dining scene where a Pokka bottle was absent. The word "Pokka" would always be facing the camera no matter which part of the table it is placed at. There was even a scene where Jason and Fei'er shared a 1.5-litre bottle. Maybe they ran out of 500ml?
Sponsors aside, The Dream Makers also made a common error, seen in many dramas, of having too many characters. The characters of Ian Fang, Jayley Woo and Vincent Ng were probably redundant. Woo and Ng's characters may have been created to enhance the character of Lisa played by Rebecca Lim but they hardly change anything.
Scenes of Fang and Woo quarrelling with each other were also surplus and have little relation to the show's genre. There was one scene of them which was particularly memorable. Fang fell down in the dance studio and Woo helped him out. However, the two calefares beside them carried on dancing as if Fang was invisible during the accident.
The editing was also suspicious in episode 29 where Jason, Tonglin and Tonglin's reporter brother Yuanren discussed about Fei'er alleged trip to the hotel. It may have been a complete scene but the editing made it look as if it was pieced together by a few different takes.
Since it the theme was on media production and the profession of artistes, Mediacorp lived up to the higher expectations that viewers had for it. A well-executed drama with equally in-depth characters that do not outshine one another. Quality acting also played an important role while the "layer effect" of a show in a show proved to be effective in diverting the audience's attention from the flaws.
Just don't let the audience have a say anymore unless you can come up with two equally logical endings to the show.
No comments:
Post a Comment