To those who have gone through the education system in Singapore would know that plagiarism is a serious offence and would most likely get you kicked out of school. Plagiarism is the act of taking information (not created by you) and using it as your own (my own interpretation). So there’s this system called citation that credits the source of where you took the information. What’s my point?

In the US and Europe, content creation is regarded as the core to any creative project, and society sees the value and appreciates the rights of the content creator. Copyrights, intellectual rights, patents, trademarks, usage rights, these are all highly enforced and appreciated there. It’s also why your iPod does not allow you to drag songs out of it onto other computers, because Apple believes in copyrights and goes all out to prevent their consumers from pirating creative content. It’s also why Napster, Mininova and Limewire were all royally lambasted by laws that protect creative content producers.

However, I think that content creation is undervalued in Singapore, maybe even in the region. Simple case in point, when little red ants started out, we applied for a grant with SPRING Singapore, some sort of an entrepreneur grant for local start ups. We got rejected because they said we didn’t offer anything new, that we were just another technical production house. They failed to see that content creation was an important part of our business proposal. Anyways, we showed them.

So, my point being, we are a society that needs to be educated, and to learn to appreciate and respect content creators more than we do now. If the creative content does not belong to you, and you would like to use it to create something, the least you could do is to credit the content creator or better still, to inform the content creator if you have the means to do so. We creatives are not selfish people who will reject you outright, so do civilised society a favour and try asking. The positive responses might surprise you.

I must admit that sometimes creative people do have their off days. And that is why we like to collaborate with other creatives to step out of our comfort zone and try new stuff. Recently, we had a blast of a time working on 插班生’s hit single 《逞强》with renowned local DJ 周崇庆. It was his first foray into directing, and our first attempt in producing such an emotional music video.

Here’s a sneak peak at how we did it, less emotional than the music video of course. =)

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