Reduce bureaucracy, dont lose out on young talent - Saifuddin

Saifuddin said that based on past experience, there are some talented young people with fresh ideas who have moved to other countries to develop their products, causing other countries to get the credit, while the original idea came from Malaysians.

For example, Saifuddin was citing the story of Pua Khein-Seng from Selangor, whose idea led to the creation of a pendrive, but the difficulty of getting funding caused him to seek help in other countries.

“This is a detrimental thing caused by bureaucracy. The development of technology and creativity run in parallel to give birth to various new creative fields such as in video games, animation and even the existence of YouTube as a new platform.

“We need to reduce bureaucracy if we want to encourage young Malaysians to be creative and pursue their talents to the fullest because these fields, which did not exist 10, 20 years ago, can now be a lucrative career,” he said after officiating the YouTube Workshop for East Coast Zone here, today.

The two-day programme, organised by the Malaysian National Film Development Corporation (Finas), was also attended by its chairman Zakaria Abdul Hamid and chief executive officer Dr Ahmad Idham Ahmad Nadzri.

While supporting the development of new talent in the creative field, Saifuddin said that it should be done within the bounds of law and decency, so that the work or product does not end up with negative effects, such as pranks, that cause annoyance to others.

“There is no limit to creativity, but of course we want to see the product has a good message. This includes the production of films and dramas where one of the sources of script ideas comes from novels… so it is necessary to ensure that the novel is good to maintain the quality of work,” he said.

Saifuddin also advised parents to better understand their children’s interest in the creative field which may be foreign to them as the creative field has developed and is no longer focused on becoming movie stars or singers.

Meanwhile, Ahmad Idham said that among the steps taken by Finas to reduce bureaucracy was to channel funds to television stations. This had never happened before, because the previous norm was only for film production, he said.