Places We Go is currently one of the offerings of the Prairies Theatre Exchange, streaming free via PTE website the whole month of March. It is a story of contemporary reality of many children in the Philippines told as a live-action animation produced by Filipino-Canadian artists Hazel Venzon and David Oro under the U N I Together Productions.
Places We Go has been in development since 2013. It started as an oral story originally titled as “Grace.” In 2017, it was renamed The Places We Go and was produced as a live-graphic novel for the Winnipeg Fringe Festival. Newly named, Places We Go is facing a new and invigorating stage in production. The creative tandem of Hazel and David explore its new form as a live-action animation.
Hazel and David welcome you into the world of Grace, a young girl who longs to bring her mother home. With the backdrop of the vibrant Metro Manila, Grace takes us to her grand adventure in the process of making her dream come true.
Inspired by common stories of separation and migration among Filipino families who are in search of greener pastures overseas, both Hazel and David have personal experiences that inspired them to create this film.
“The story is also heavily inspired by my cousin. Without her kind of unfortunate experiences, I wouldn’t understand the depth and weight of family separation and then family reunification and the deep challenges,” shared Hazel.
“My dad went to Saudi Arabia. My mom, brother and I moved here in ’97 but my dad was still in Saudi. Family separation extends not only to being OFWs but even migrating to Canada. The story will resonate to Filipinos who experienced the same,” said David.
David planned to turn the film into a tangible piece of material like a graphic novel book until they got a call from PTE asking if they had an entry for the season. At that time, they were working on another project about second chances.
“I felt like if that is a theme (we were working on) then I think we should give our play a second chance. And that evolved into this second life in the digital world. Now it’s special because it’s kind of permanent on the internet now,” David excitedly shared.
Hazel and David had their fair share of challenges in the technical aspect of the production. David had to put everything on acetate sheets before he could bring the story to life. Later, he realized that he needed powerful computers and printers to help him do the job.
Hazel Venzon and David Oro
While David explored on stitching together the visuals, Hazel experimented on her character as the eight-year old Grace and the voice of the rest of the characters in the story.
“I’m a trained performer, actress and everything. So, I use all of those techniques, right visualization, then I will find her voice and then who is this one and I’ll find her voice and so lots of playful experiments. In terms of writing them, I think it was essential for Grace to learn specific lessons like what I drew up. That wasn’t my imagination, but all of them are mine,” shared Hazel.
Asked what their takeaways are on the story and the production…
“The importance of storytelling and the pride that you can take with you like the confidence that you can have to really tell our story without really caring who’s going to latch on to it or not, it’s really about your own self-expression,” Hazel said.
“You just need to grind it out until the very end, or else it’s not going to happen. The execution part is very important, and I would like that as a message to everybody, to any creative Filipino, people of color or a creator out there who wants to make something is to make it and not just think about it. All these times, all these ideas are amazing…until you create it and execute it.
