Set Design: President's Star Charity 1997

I just realised the "2023" Edition of President's Star Charity goes on air tomorrow Sunday October 22nd, and I reckon it would be a fun time to share images of my designed PRESIDENT'S STAR CHARITY set for 1997!

With a "Circus" / "Big Top" theme, I had delved into the concept with aplomb (one of my secret fave bucket-list genres to do). By this year I had been a Senior Set Designer in the Production Services Variety Unit, with this show being one of my favourite "bigger shows" done in TCS before I left in '98.

Featured here are select snaps of the performances in TV Theatre of The Television Corporation of Singapore in Caldecott as officiated by the late Mr Ong Teng Cheong. But first a glimpse at my proposed design and presentation drawing, cheers.

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Knowing that there'll be huge numbers of talents at a time on stage, Id decided to go full on colours in my background set, a richer deeper vibrant palette, which the lighting design could go full-on light up (to see talent), and as well provide a counter visual(s) to close-ups to talent performing. And because the talents would be moving around the entire stage a lot more than usual, and at faster speeds (not like snow walking to slow tempo ballads), special effect follow lights might be challenging, hence a colorful palette, hopefully with enough space and depth for a somewhat "depth of field" to be achieved. Well, those were the design plan, anyways.






Alas this is also one of my shows that do not have full documentation for (at least util this point of blogpost publication) besides colored drawings and blurry photographs, except for these ones seen here on Facebook, cheers. Hopefully I might excavate more as time goes by, and I'll attempt to update this post, cheers.






Featured below is a look at my construction drawing package for PSC'97 (also watchable here on @andyhengart Instagram), with the resulting stage set/setting seen above, cheers.



This was also the show/year where actress Cassandra See had an accident, where she fell from her flying fox stunt during rehearsal, causing her "to fall several metres to the ground and suffer a head injury." (On 8days.sg). I remembered being in the audience seat during that incident - staying back to snap pictures of my "set in action" - and of the subsequent "reactions" to the accident. I remembered all the design department heads being tasked to cushion all edges and corners of the props, and to double check safety on all setting props and hand-props too.

"Safety" was the first consideration in my mind when I designed the props for the show, but the onus was now on the department heads. I remembered the conversation(s) of "why actors need to go through these harrowing ordeals to plea for money?" had gone on even before this incident, and this fueled that discussion even moreso.

In the years following, we see more "performance"-based acts, and less of the "death-defying" genre, as seen in 1997's. No small wonder that the 1997 edition is not as often - if at all - mentioned in the annuals of the event, which had started in '94, through to now. Video footage is near impossible to find now.