MANILA, Philippines?Welcome to Betty?s playground.

Actually, the set of the new ABS-CBN soap opera ?I Love Betty La Fea? is a ?designer?s playhouse.?

The art department is having a ball sprucing up the main set, the Eco Moda office, built from scratch on the 11th floor of the ELJ Building (or the Kapamilya headquarters) in Quezon City, relates production designer Chris Ecker de Guzman.

?On other soaps, designers only get to work on a plain house. On this show, we get to build and play with the sets. It?s a designer?s piece,? De Guzman explains.

For example, the ladies? and men?s rooms are labelled Señoritas and Caballeros. De Guzman also incorporated the other countries (US, India, Korea, etc.) that hold the ?Betty? franchise in the Eco Moda logo in the hallway.

The Eco Moda office, which covers 200 square meters, or roughly half of the floor space, adheres to a standard color scheme.

?I mixed aqua, pink and lime with white in all the rooms,? De Guzman says. ?Even the props revolve around those three colors.?

On ?Ugly Betty,? the US version, the design template is limited to one color: orange. He says, ?The local Betty is actually more challenging because we have to work with three colors.?

De Guzman recounts that the team decided to build the Eco Moda set for practical reasons, ?because 70 percent of Betty?s story happens in the office. If we shoot in a real building, we?d have to wait until after office hours before we can start taping. Here, we can tape 24-7.?

He also makes sure that the office layout can accommodate the camera crew.

?The conference room is designed like an aquarium,? he points out. ?The cameramen can shoot from the various see-through panels and windows in the different rooms and offices.?

De Guzman?s favorite is the staff?s work stations, which can be described as an explosion of colors and design details.

For the office of villainess Daniela (played by Ruffa Gutierrez), he factored in the star (and the character?s) larger-than-life diva personality. ?Everyone knows she?s a beauty queen. So I put in columns to denote her towering presence.?

Gutierrez says she adores her new workplace: ?I love that it?s pink. The network pulled out all the stops for this set, spending more than P5 million.?

Since Eco Moda is an advertising agency/publishing house, casual ad placements may be inserted all over the set, De Guzman says.

Bea Alonzo, who plays Betty, says working in the ELJ Building is convenient. ?We can finish a lot of scenes because everything is done here. But we also have some scenes in Quiapo.?

?Building our own sets gives us the freedom to play with the concept,? De Guzman notes.

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