It was a great pleasure to work with prestige’s organization such as Radio Television Brunei (RTB), where it takes great initiative to train its Cameraman to become Director of Photography (DOP) to meet the increasing needs and enhance the station’s production value.

The production team including cameraman or DOP should be stationed in TV station for doing production. TV production is a creative fielded where constant practices and practical exposure needed to be creative and innovative.  Meanwhile, DOP should be stand-alone field that cannot be mixed and matched with any other fields or transferring to another department.  The longer the year they serve, the more flexible and creative the staff can be.  By moving or promoting staff to entirely new department that is irrelevant to the fields, will be a waste of human capital resources and money.  The promotion should be in-line with the relevant fields, so the progress can be seen in the production of TV programmes.

AIBD/RTB In-Country workshop on DOP in Brunei Darussalam

The training should have included the director and the production team so that everyone will know their respective job’s scope.  It will help to reduce the down time in production since all the artistes of RTB are part time and the entire production team have to rely on their availability.  To produce a 25-mins’ drama or any genre, the maximum production time should be 1½ to 2 days. Anything more than 2 days will be costly and waste of precious time.  RTB needs to identify the staff base on their specific area of skills and train them only in one particular field that they are interested in, which in return would improve the production value.

RTB’s staffs and outside production participants were very creative, even though there are limited equipment available for them to execute their work.