Adaptations from literature to film in our time: An excerpt

Keynote speaker and lecturer Santiago Diokno.

Are we seeing the apocalypse of traditional filmmaking and its distribution? Has the internet and multimedia platforms brought about the doom of cinema?

Works of literature have been adapted to film from the dawn of the film industry. Of late, award-winning films are mostly adaptations from novels.

The moviegoers are at the cusp of massive evolution within the sphere of filmmaking — orbiting, growing sophisticated aesthetics, in visual expressions, in graphic imaging, inter-virtual reality simulations, simultaneously moving at a rate faster than we can apprehend.

Going out of our comfort zone to catch a movie has become out of fashion when the world is a click away at the palm of our hands. And the list goes on making life easier for us in a swipe of a hand.

The battle for attention goes from movie titles by how these are screened, their manner of portability and at a preferred time, practically at 24/7, 365 days a year.

Food, shopping, travels, bookings, banking, utilities, research, socials, entertainment, romance are now made available entirely on demand. Commerce and trade fuel the staples to progress and evolution of the world. The centripetal force of our comfort zones has never been made stronger than today’s law of aggregate economics, in its law of supply and demand.

The powers of technology overreaching its control over our lives, shifting the knob to the manufacturers made compelling for the consumers to give in and give up old habits and traditions. But this is not quite clear in the case of filmmaking. The more films are produced both by the networks and independent suppliers, the odds of gaining viewership are slim.

How does the Filipino filmmaker beat these overwhelming figures of blockbusters like the Avengers, Black Panther, Operation Red Sea, Star Wars from around the world when we talk about our own teeny-weeny, independently produced films, that might find a million pesos big enough to see our films through to the audience?

Let us examine closely how we approach the art of making films.

First, it begins with the germination of an idea. If the idea is not a good one to begin with, everything that follows falter from the narrative to distribution channels by cause and effect.

To avoid such trap is to understand the techniques of filmmaking through discussions, presentations, and an inquiry into the writing project limitations in adapting a novel as a screenplay and the filming from it through the lenses of critiquing literature to film.

Every step in filmmaking should be treated with care and respect and devotion from craft to the delivery of the film’s message.

Let us research well, write well, light well, act well, frame well, edit well. Novice or not, we would have made a powerful film to impact an infinity of the audience’s lives.