Just time for brain storming... Gathered together as a group having the same direction coming out with possible question to ask the potential interviewees. For Screen Media, we were quite familiar on how the direction should be and how we should structure the questions. We decided to use our past documentaries questions as reference and slowly we narrowed it down for individual potential interviewees.

During the discussion there were lots of different opinion from our group and of course our lecturers. It was a hard time narrowing the questions into a simple form so that the structure of the documentary will be nicely form and our interviewees can understand better and give us a answer that make sense rather than a whole recording of answers that we can't use for the documentary.

On 4 Aug 2015

Meet & Greet with Nyan Soe Alumni of Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts majoring in Sculpture.

Nyan Soe moved into the city Yangon when he was at the age of 13. He grew up in a Chinese Family. Living in Yangon for almost 8 years and he didn’t heard or see any form of Puppetry before in Myanmar. Since he is from the Chinese family, he is not expose to this Art Form.

He added; “I only saw the puppetry performance for only about 5 minutes, however, it was with a tourist group at the hotel in Bagan.”

Opinion from him through chatting, older generation may want the younger generation to preserve the culture and tradition of the puppetry. Even if he is part of the committee or organization of the puppetry, he will want to preserve it as it is.

He even mention that young generation in Myanmar is totally not expose and no hand to the culture and tradition about puppetry. The only way they know about the basic knowledge of puppetry will be from the textbooks.

Should their locals to be more expose to puppetry? How to they make it interesting enough to attract locals? 

After my first research that I found in www.irrawaddy.org that was posted in 2013. 

Puppetry was once a popular art form in Burma, and was used as a medium to tell stories and educate people in religion, history, literature and culture.

Since 1975 one of Burma’s famous puppet artist died, Pan Aye and team still perform the dance performances with artist Thein Zaw. After 1988 uprising against the military regime, public celebration become lesser. 

Ma Ma Naing was the owner of a small souvenir shop and she does not know to make them dance. 

In 1989, tourists pushed her to set up a theatre to perform the puppet. So she rushed to see Pan Aye, a veteran puppeteer in Mandalay and asked for help to perform to the tourist and asked Pan Aye to help to set up the theatre after then. 

It was founded in 1990 and it is the only puppet theatre in Mandalay that only attract tourist. 

Ma Ma Naing was glad that she could somehow help this dying art to prevent it from disappearing and was encouraged to maintain the culture. The art form of this puppetry was only attracted by tourist instead of the locals even it is a entrance free. 

Pan Aye added, “it dying,” “not because of the lack of professional puppeteers, but because of the lack of audience.” 

Why is it dying? Why does locals doesn’t want to support its own art form to maintain the culture and tradition?

Second Lesson...

One week just flow through so quickly and dates to Mandalay, Myanmar is just nearer and nearer...

It is just another session of meeting the group to discuss and pouring out our own opinion.

A hand out was given out and I really appreciated it. It is a guide to make us moving. First thing before we even move on was to lock down the direction that we are approaching. We will be working on the line of the "Dying out forms". The group just sat in a circle to share ideas and giving our own opinion on the issue that we talk about.

As professionals from the Screen Media, we took the responsibly to be in charge of the; flow of the documentary, question to be asked during the interview, visual (Potential CutAway) to be in the documentary, basic research of the location in Mandalay, Myanmar & Photos for exhibition.





During the last half an hour of the meeting, me and one of my Screen Media partner, Rohiim draft out the questions.

Doing it in a very different way from what we did for our very own documentary. The question planned out is for three different categories of people.

It will be still on going till Monday 3 August to finalise the questions.