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 | | Front of Kids United brochure |
In 2001, an old friend at Dream Forest Productions invited me to be the Executive Story Editor for the second season of a popular pre-teen drama on Kids Central. The show was Kids United. It stars Kenneth Lim, Rauzan, Daniel Riggs, Sunny Chye, Carla Dunareanu and Ng Mei Xi. It's a coming-of-age show involving a group of friends who tackle the trials of growing up in Singapore. It deals with social issues and pressures faced by kids these days, all with humour and engaging storylines. In this second season, I put in a girl (we ended up with two) to add to the perspective of the four original boys in the series. This was the first kid's show I was writing for. I had written for young characters before and was comfortable doing it but this was a whole show where the principal characters were all under 12.
As the Executive Story Editor, I planned the whole season's worth of episodes, working outthe character arcs and working with the team of writers on the story beats and editing the scripts for character and dialogue consistency as well as tweaking the plots.
 | | Back of Kids United brochure |
It was both a challenge and a pleasure. Challenge because as a pre-teen drama, Arts Central had certain requirements for it and there were many times certain lines or story points that didn't go down well with them. Or when we had to work in issues into the stories. We had to make sure the story was still the strongest element and not whatever message we had to preach. A pleasure because the series was fun to write. It had a lot of humour (both verbal and slapstick) and yet had to have a deep story without sounding preachy or confusing. I was glad I worked on the season.
We had one change of cast from the original season: we had a new Benson (Kenneth Lim). He started a little nervously but rose to the occasion. We adapted the character to suit the actor and by the end of the season, he was just Benson to me. I'd even call him that instead of by his real name.
 | | The cast of Kids United |
The best part of the show was not the high ratings it got on Kids Central (it was consistently in the top five and often number one; see the press release) but watching the characters really come alive in such an exuberant manner.
Get more information about Kids United from the Dream Forest web site.
Here are three episodes that I wrote for the second season. You'll need Acrobat Reader to view them. You can get a free download of the reader from Adobe's site. I have to make a comment about the script formatting. It's the half-page video format and not the way I prefer to write my scripts. I stuck to this because the team was familiar with it.
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