By Edd Aragon

Editor’s notes: Ang Himig Natin (Juan Peso) is an experimental digital movie by Edd Aragon, who uses scanned images, photographed ultraviolet paintings and digital animation created by a computer paint program. It launches officially on Bonifacio Day at Inquirer.net’s Global Nation, YouTube, Pinoycentric, and Aragon’s personal blog. Watch the video.

Working in Nonoy Marcelo’s animation studio back in 1978 gave me rudimentary animation skills using hand-drawn images. Also during this time Nonoy published Bukol Magazine where I was one of his editors.

It was a Pinoy version of Mad magazine and involved cartoonists, writers, and serious Filipino painters who willingly tried their hand in the comics genre. Juan Peso was the name of the comic character I created and have now rebirthed in this video, which is kind of a visual narrative using WMM© effects and metamorphosing digital still images ( I’d like to think of it as a short film with an analogue attitude and a digital rush).

Back then editing alone was so time-consuming. Imagine actually handling celluloid film rolls just after eating a sticky rice-pudding; splicing and tweening them over a lightbox for days, cels everywhere (pieces of celluloid where drawings and colors are painted), each second in the film requiring at least 24 separate drawings; not to mention “synching” images with soundtrack that seemed to squeak fast-forward-rewind forever as the lever was cranked to move the film roll under the tapehead. Amazingly patient and tenacious artists, these animators–I take a bow.

I persisted in having Noel Cabangon’s adaptation of Pepe Smith’s “Ang Himig Natin” as a soundtrack for the video as I found it appropriate when he used the lyrical “Pilipinas.” Also a fitting tribute to Juan dela Cruz for having a created a timeless masterpiece sung by Pinoys everywhere (even in Muntinlupa!).

Somehow an inspired chemistry developed when I got kind permission from Mr. Cabangon (thru Sylvia Mayuga) to use his song, likewise delightful permission from Wally Gonzalez of Juan dela Cruz Band. I could have probably sung and played the guitar myself, but why ruin a good video?

Fission or fusion, under a drowning spell of “watery” movie special effects, I’ve considered making a video with images streaming as single hydrogen molecule and twice life-giving oxygen molecules embodied by Cabangon’s rendition and Juan dela Cruz’s classic composition to complete it.

Sensitive to everyday news via Filipino TV here in Sydney, I feel fluidity might save the day for a lot of Filipinos, an eddy of power to change shape and reform under various political temperatures. Maybe, too, like water nationalism is fluid, penetrating the tiniest veins where Filipino blood runs warm, slowly breaching indifference thru osmosis; evaporating to join the heavens and return to an ocean of hope where an almost utopian transparency of water shall allow the majority to see the beauty and watch a healthy coral of a democratic nation grow.

Credits:
Music by Noel Cabangon, used with permission
“Ang Himig Natin” copyright: Wally Gonzalez, Jose “Pepe” Smith, Juan dela Cruz Band, 1973 (with kind permission)

Edd Aragon is a Filipino artist based in Sydney, Australia.