Creative Media Production For Stories about ASEAN countries

Abstract

This research is a sub-project of the ASEAN Integrated
Media Practice Scholarship (AIMS), sponsored by RatchadapisekSompote Fund, Chulalongkorn University. The study was purposed to examine performing art-based creative process and its
roles to 1) create creative story-telling and narrative arts relating
to ASEAN community building and civic engagement; 2) create
better understandings of different identities of ASEAN neighboring countries through the creative media production. Guided by
concepts of performing arts-based learning as a tool to transform
inner thoughts and produce creative media, practice-based research method was employed with 30 participants, who were
graduate students and media professionals from the ASEAN
countries, i.e. Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam,Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines and Thailand.The study
was divided into 2 phases. In thefirst phase, performing art-based
creative process was employed to facilitate work collaboration
among the groups of participants:to share ideas, discuss, and
create narrative story of each country; whereas in the second
phase, the groups of participants were assigned to apply the
narrative story of each country to create their own performing
arts-based piece of work.
The results indicated that, the performing arts-based creative
process to create creative story-telling and narrative arts of
ASEAN neighboring countries was characterized by 1)learning
activities that enhance work collaboration, 2) dialogue-and-discussion approach,and 3) narrative techniques and tools that help
the narrator to overcome the language barriers,i.e. body-telling
technique, image theatre, and shadow puppets, mixing with
video-clip technique.In terms of creating the better understandings of different identities of their ASEAN neighboring countries,
through the performing arts-based creative process, the participants were more sensitive and had more accurate understandings
relating to the identity differences of their ASEAN neighborhood.
Besides, through the group activities and discussion, interestingly, culturalsimilarities among the ASEAN countries in terms of
greeting symbols (language and gesture),tales and myths relating
to their gods (slightly different in details), and cultural and political perspectives, were also found.