A NEW music video renders in imaginative animation a song based on love poems written by award-winning poet and Faculty of Arts and Letters professor Nerissa del Carmen Guevara, fulfilling the multimedia possibilities of her acclaimed poetry collection-cum-music-album, Reaching Destinations, where the poems first appeared.
The video, End to the Full Moon, features vocalist Aia de Leon and is produced by Lara Agulto and Louie Cordero. De Leon wrote the lyrics of the song based on three poems by Guevara—“Lover, I Spelled You,” “Full Moon,” and “End,” thus the song’s title, End to the Full Moon.
Agulto, herself a musician drummer of Death by Tampon, rendered the video’s animation based on the concept of Cordero, a visual artist. Cordero had thought of using 18th century wood-block prints showing images of hummingbirds, a “monster plant,” curved-leaf plants, a heart, and clouds.
The video starts with the radial opening of patterned branches in the eye of a hummingbird. The slow beat in this part of the video coincides with the slow flapping of the hummingbirds’ wings, creating a calming effect.
The conflict starts when the hummingbird is trapped by what Guevara refers to as the “monster plant.” Here, a line from Guevara’s poem, “End,” —“the edge of my eye”—is portrayed by the trapped bird asking for help from other birds that it sees from the edges of its eyes. The video ends by focusing on the heart, radiating like a sun from the sky.
“The heart is a metaphor for the hope that every human being tries to hold on to,” Agulto told the Varsitarian. “The monster plant is the machine that consumes us all. We are mere mortals that strive for everlasting grace after our time ends.”
The video has an eclectic feel to it with its unique splattered black-and-gold spots and red circle appearing randomly in every scene. The imagery in the video is animated in slow-paced and sequential movements, fitting De Leon’s soft-spoken voice.
“I think De Leon wanted to challenge herself by putting into lyrics not just one but three poems,” Guevara told the Varsitarian.
While “Lover, I Spelled You” tells of an unrequited juvenile love, “Full Moon” expresses eroticism as shown in the line, “tightly bond in a circle of skin.” The third poem used in the song’s lyrics, “End,” fits the song’s chronology of love’s progress and demise.
Guevara explained that the persona in the last poem is described as standing in a boulevard, looking out on the waves of the sea. “The last in the chronology tells of an ‘end’ of a love affair, while the other two are promising,” she said.
Following the multimedia trend, Guevara’s Reaching Destinations was published by the UST Publishing House along with a CD album of select poems from the collections performed by top alternative artists such as Pinikpikan, Acid 42, Badjao, and Barbie Almabis. The album won Best Secular Album in the 2005 Catholic Mass Media Awards. Rafael S. Mejia
