Book to Screen: The Business of Adaptation

Bernice Low (Malaysia)

After watching Schindler’s List at a cinema in the UK, Bernice decided that she preferred seeing her name in lights to seeing it at the bottom of law reports. After returning to Malaysia with a law degree from Nottingham University, she moonlighted writing for television whilst taking her Malaysian Bar exams. Her career began with Malaysia’s best known English language sitcom, KOPITIAM, in 1999. This was followed by the inevitable period of creative wildness where Bernice did everything from tech reporting to corporate ghostwriting, whilst honing her writing skills through several screenplays as well as a Professional Program in Screenwriting course with the UCLA. After a segue into the dark side as a Development Executive with Ideate Media where her claim to fame was rewriting a pitch deck for Scott Free Films and offending the executives at A+E Networks with comedy pitch about expats, Bernice returned to her screenwriting roots as Head Writer for Season 2 of the Mediacorp blockbuster series, LION MOMS. After Lion Moms, Bernice worked as head writer on the first Malaysian Korean series remake, BLACK for Viu TV.  Her most recent projects include THAT COVER GIRL for Amazon Prime, IMAM, PI for Astro Shaw, and Malaysia’s second highest grossing feature film, POLIS EVO 3.

Justin Deimen (Singapore)

With an appetite for uncertainty and a capacity for self-direction as well as being able to uniquely grasp the entire media equation as both a hands-on builder and corporate leader - Justin Deimen is one of the few global-minded creative producers and a holistic entrepreneurs who has established high-growth media businesses while executing major international & cross-cultural (co)productions across all genres/formats in every major territory. He's often the focal point of complex/matrix teams with an established track record of identifying & closing deals across multiple forms of capital via credit/debt financing, private equity & venture funding while also managing various projects and product life-cycles through its inception into monetisation.

Through his commercial insights and deep industry experience, and being the nexus between the corporate and indie creative worlds, he builds scalable & impactful partnerships across the entire ecosystem in Film/TV, Branded Activation, Media-Tech, Adsales & Advertising, Gaming, Events, Marketing, Licensing, Distribution, IP Development, Fundraising and M&A. 

In a varied career of being a creative executive, journalist, media strategist, screenwriter, producer, and financier, he's previously held roles in 108 Media, ONE Championship, Hyde Park Intl, VH1, Fox Searchlight, The Village Voice, the Intl Film Fest Rotterdam, & structured alternative asset funds with private banks and was accredited with the Intl Federation of Film Critics.

Moderator Colin Goh (Singapore)

COLIN GOH, co-creator of Dim Sum Warriors, a children’s comic series, saw it evolve into a musical in China, licensed by Scholastic, now integral to a patented bilingual language learning system. He began drawing comic strips at 17 and is also a lawyer in three jurisdictions, creator of TalkingCock.com, writer/director of "Singapore Dreaming," and cartoonist of two New York Times bestsellers.