When it comes to Budget coverage, the way it is done has always been more or less the same each year.
Photographers would take portrait pictures of Singaporeans from all walks of life, to go with stories on how the measures would affect the newsmakers. The artists will take the facts and figures and transform them into infographics or diagrams.
The end product is a package that is several pages thick.
I must confess that all this information is sometimes just too much for me to digest.
And surely, I'd believe, there are people out there who feel the same.
Through the Lens (TTL), The Straits Times visual journalism website, has been running multimedia stories since we launched in September last year.
So I thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we could summarise the key measures into a 3-minute multimedia piece?"
Together with my colleague, Neo Xiaobin, we brainstormed several ideas two days before Budget 2011.
We realised that our usual way of marrying photographs with text and sound will not work. It could not show the cause-and-effect of Budget's measures, an aspect which we thought was crucial. We wanted the characters in the story to undergo a change due to the new measures. There has to be some form of visual reinforcement.
"Why not we do it in Lego?" I said.
It would be cute, and fun, to watch. It goes with our concept of keeping it simple. We can manipulate the figures to move in whatever way we want. And, it would be more accessible for younger audiences.
We read the Budget preview stories, and bought nine Lego figures and an assortment of "props" that we thought would most likely be relevant.
Back home, Xiaobin dug up two boxes worth of Lego bricks from her childhood. I plucked out a figure from my only Lego collection left - a spaceship - for the first time in decades. When I compared it with the new ones we bought, mine was all faded.
We then talked about how to tell the story. It was the day before Budget 2011, and we only had an inkling of the measures that would be unveiled.
Even then, things might radically change on February 18.
There was little we could except tie down the concept and filming method. We would shoot with a camera mounted on a tripod, pointed directly above a piece of white paper.
This paper became a stage, a canvas. It gave us more flexibility in producing our stop-motion video. We could move the figures in any manner we want, in ways that 'defy' gravity.
In other words, it allowed us to go a little crazy.
On Budget day, we waited anxiously for the copy of the speech that would be given to the press. A blurb for our video in the papers had already been confirmed for the next day. When we obtained a list of the key measures, it was 3 p.m.
We knew it would be impossible to include all the measures in the video. So, we selected only the ones that we felt affected the most people, and rewrote them in simple and concise phrases.
Then, we storyboarded. We grouped the phrases according to topic and arranged them so that they made for smooth transitions between scenes.
Next, we sketched out how the Lego figures would appear, move and change, for all the scenes. The change can either be literal or metaphorical. Most importantly, it must show cause-and-effect.
After a few slices of pizza with Redbull, we began shooting at 8 p.m. Xiaobin wrote the text in little slips of paper which she torn out. We made minute adjustments to the background and figures for every photo that I took. We swapped the heads and bodies of figures, and even dismembered one of them.
It was an exercise in patience and creativity, under growing fatigue.
Photography ended at midnight. It took another three hours in the editing suite to piece everything together into a video, which we uploaded online at 4 a.m.
Exhausted but happy, we packed the Lego figures away.
Maybe we'll get to play with them again next year.
Click here to watch the video.