NEWS
2024.12.04
【Report】 The 73rd AJI Frontier Seminar was held! Dr. Joanna Obispo presented “Mapping the Creative Workforce: Voiceover and Localization Talents in the Philippine Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs)”
The 73rd AJI Frontier Seminar was held online on Tuesday, November 12, 2024. In this seminar, Dr. Joanna Luisa B. Obispo, a Senior Researcher at Ritsumeikan Asia-Japan Research Organization, gave a presentation titled “Mapping the Creative Workforce: Voiceover and Localization Talents in the Philippine Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs).”
Dr. Obispo explained that creative industries in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines offer great potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. The Philippines’ local animation industry offers services from storyboarding in the preproduction stage to dubbing in post-production. While some artists are employed in big companies or belong to small or medium businesses the majority consider themselves as freelancers.
The Philippines is among the top global providers of business process outsourcing, but critical gaps exist in understanding creative workers identities, needs, and contributions, and these are the gaps which her research aims to fill. Most of the artists she interviewed work around the capital, Manila, and have degrees in Mass Communication or Art related courses. In search of work, these artists average about five auditions per week and participate in up to fifteen projects in a year. They are employed through casting calls, personal contacts, artist groups, production houses, social media, and freelance sites for work in corporate video, social media ads, radio and TV commercials, explainer videos, live show/events, animation, and on YouTube.
She explained that in the West, such creative workers are well paid and in Japan, voice actors are celebrities with a status close to pop idols. However, in the Philippines they have no time for rehearsals, their scripts are censored, their pay is low compared to other Asians, and they receive little training or education. Conversely in Japan, there are many voice acting schools that are part of a voice acting production agency focusing on actual employment opportunities.
Dr. Obispro stressed the need to reward the valuable contribution of Filipino “localizers” who take content from any source and make it available to local audiences by using local languages, culture sharing, and exploring new materials, whether in their original language, dubbed, or subbed. She stressed that there is a need to treat Filipino talents as part of a “global creative network.” To protect and sustain such creative workers it is necessary to formalize Philippine CCI through the establishment of government laws and policies and understand creative work as a “social enterprise.”
In the Q&A session the enthusiastic audience asked Dr. Obispo about the local dialects of the Philippines and the work done by “localizers,” enquired about the kinds of programs that were popular, and discussed outsourcing to other Asian countries.
Dr. Obispo delivering her presentation
Please visit the following link for previous AJI Frontier Seminars:
https://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/research/aji/young_researcher/seminar/archive/