Becoming Filipino & Digital Storytelling: My Journey and Answers to the Glitch
My digital storytelling journey has finally reached its endpoint - for now, but I'd like to take this opportunity to look back and reflect on things that I really have thought about ever since the start of this course.
My prior knowledge of digital storytelling has made me convinced that my niche and my interests all belong here. This reassured me that by all costs, majoring in creative communication was about telling stories, pushing narratives, and creating striking assemblages that might soon establish a well-deserved place for everyone to see and experience. Digital Storytelling is all about creating, as emphasized, experimenting, and articulating what is above and beyond narrating stories. This isn't very limiting, because really, the sky's the limit, and everything has to move for something to happen.
As for our major project, stretched from midterms to finals, we are tasked to create story assemblages that have three components: Scientific, Social Commentary, and Personal. For our major project, Becoming Filipino was born.
The process of working on it has allowed me to answer the following questions: Why are we here? Why are we doing this? Why did we create this through this? This would ultimately discuss the reasons why Becoming Filipino is what it is today. As the director and an editor of the project, who convinced my fellow groupmates to plan and strategize what we want to do, we are just severely inspired by the events that happened before, happening during, and happening even after today.
The project wasn't a chore to begin with. Conceptualizing what we're aiming for was the first, hence we had a few meetings to really talk about what we want this project to be, and our collective vision for the experiments we're trying to make. We want the viewer to be the center stage of everything, hence the subject of enunciation. Our goal was to attach them wholly to the media content that we wanted to implement via a website, or in our physical experience, in a CTR (Cathode Ray Tube) Television.
We want it to be uncanny, some of our members said. We also want it to be unconventional, and scary, and then we want it to be realistic. Deeply realistic. Relatable to a degree, gaining a feeling that can be horrifying or may shiver down your spine, something that can be replicated by an emotion, or a thought, and something that we always want to remind our audience every day.
We want to lure the viewers first by presenting a facade, something that would eventually tear them apart and make them vulnerable for the first few minutes. Regular viewers might think, that this is just a boring, replicable website, and our team decided on a premise for the project, "Someone should be visiting this site, asking and wanting to get his/her/their Philippine National ID." Ironic, because we want to reiterate the idea that the National ID in the Philippines is horrifyingly delayed, and as I'm writing this now, a lot of Filipinos are still waiting for theirs; some didn't come with an actual ID, but only paper or digitalized. We took advantage of that problem and connected it with the discourse that we're trying to make, eventually creating a fictional agency that mirrored what an agency would look like in the Philippines - left behind, outdated, inaccessible, and poorly made, but then it is heavily idealized by the idea that agencies should have established a smooth connection, especially if these IDs are legalized and implemented by the government.
We want the website to be as authentic and claustrophobic as possible, hence the minimalism and the immediate CTA which is the registration form.
Scientific - Me and You
This is the introductory part of the project, the viewers are required to watch all of the three videos because it is mandated by the website. The first part of the series highly revolves around the scientific aspect of the project - The facts, the numbers, and the pieces of evidence mixed with sarcasm. Me and You highlights Filipino autonomy, and how Filipinos live their lives inside the country. We particularly highlight the notion that gender roles are a big part of society, mostly intertwined with how men and women should do, as reflected by the perceptions of the Global North. We are colonized by Eurocentric views, hence we are not yet fully claimed with Filipino-centered views of how gender should take place, and how we are forced to work in the long run, hence the satirical view of men doing the dirty work, and women just being defenseless as a response, and the hierarchal and structured view of the social classes present and breathing in the Philippines.
The first video is highly patriotic at first, with the visuals of glorifying Filipino clips (recycled and captured by our team) and the static visual elements that symbolize what the narrator is talking about. The feeling is singsong and carefree because we want to make sure that we can brief the viewers first before showing our true colors. We persuade and inform, but at what cost?
Social Commentary - Behind the Smile (Is the Struggle)
One of our members, who is a student activist and is a part of the university's student council, took the part wholly to tell a story of struggle and injustice. The social commentary behind the smile (is a struggle) sums up the atrocities that the Philippine Government failed to protect and serve its people, hence our workers almost embracing the brink of death just to make ends meet.
This is also the part where everything starts to glitch away and analog horror overpowers to send a message to its viewers. What I felt during the editing and drafting of the video was hollowness, not responding and reacting to anything, and ultimately, it felt like I was in any-spaces whatever, frozen on the spot, not knowing that the pictures and the monologue could deeply resonate with its viewers once published and released. We asked the selected students who were recorded in real-time while they were doing the experience, and most were frowned upon in the second part of the series.
The team emphasized the utilization of morbid visuals in the second video because we felt the need to do it to add a degree of guilt and explain the situation of the current working sector in the country. The farmers and factory workers were amongst the most underpaid, considering that their wages were also not livable. Fighting for liveable wages was considered a threat by the state, hence they were also targets for extrajudicial killings in the country.
Personal - Why are you Filipino?
This series is a journey itself that shows a story about us, potential makers and catalysts of change, yet witnessed the atrocities and the dim view of becoming Filipino.
The third and final part of the experience was the title "Why are you Filipino?". Visuals started to drift by and it already felt gloomy because of its VCR overlays and with a hint of uplifting music in the background. "Why are you Filipino" shows the amalgamation of the monsters, the people behind outside and inside the screen; and ourselves, as Filipinos. This focuses on the interactive feature for the viewer as if we're searching for vital and physical biometric identification to complete the process and eventually get the National ID afterward.
What I really want to showcase in the third video is that it really shows how we are boxed with the misfortunes of becoming Filipino. I personally felt such an instance where being a Filipino might be a curse; something that I never wish would have become if I were to be reincarnated in the next life. We are categorized and searched because nothing is peaceful anymore. We have become the monsters ourselves. The need to reflect on the environment we're living in is a must. Our group vehemently wanted to promote havoc in the last part of the series, building angst, and void, and our critical perspective in becoming Filipino.
"We are too conflicted not to recognize ourselves anymore."
The Distribution - Finding for Becoming Filipino's place in the world
Becoming Filipino is published on TikTok, a popular app that showcases different types and categories of videos, and we felt the need to post it there because it can be instantly accessed anywhere and everywhere. Analog Horror is becoming mainstream, with the hashtags #analoghorror and #uncannyvalley having their place in the TikTok horror genre. We took advantage of what we can publish on TikTok, making it an outlet for anything horror and analog-related.
We are grateful that we get to interview and let the experience open to the public, especially with friends and students from the university to pilot test our website, with over 50+ responses and website entries. As we progress, we also want to optimize a much smoother service hence were accepted suggestions on what could make the website run better. The registration form was the main highlight of the website, and the rest is just easter eggs that will potentially be used for future projects, with different narratives (hopefully).
The semiotic stratification was achieved and ended in the distribution phase. I also want this domain to be a documentation for this project, and this project deserves to be seen internationally, captivating reactions of different people and at different times.
Sharing such social awareness in unique storytelling would captivate the viewers' reactions, one that I could vividly remember was when we interviewed a student from the university, who witnessed and experienced the project live. She instantly told us that her experience refreshed her senses and kept her on track to what's happening now, especially when she is still drowning with academic work. This rekindled her commitment to serving the people, a common and similar manifestation from almost everyone we interviewed and shared their thoughts about experiencing the video.
Maybe I was numbed down because I was the one editing all of the good parts (intense parts) of the series, but I also hold the same manifesations as expressed by Paulene Marie Entice, who gruelly participated on the experience. Silence holds a key factor in impacting the series overall, because it just trickles down to the emotional impact and heightens the senses of the viewers, and that would be really seen with their reactions.
A consultation is needed to run down and remove unnecessary parts throughout the process to avoid complaints (and hopefully no one was hurt and too disturbed by the experience as a whole :(( ). But at least, the final product still holds the same value as what we envisioned initially.
This project IS the amalgamation of the real world.
This type of unconventional storytelling can encapsulate what we can envision, and what we envision is that this reality is harsh, except if you want to romanticize it. This project doesn't hold romanticization but instead utilizes a satirical element of horror that might be humorous at first, but then as it progresses, reveals the true horrors of our time today.
Becoming Filipino is hard to look at. Becoming Filipino speaks encapsulated words of awareness. Becoming Filipino wants you to be uncomfortable, uneasy, socially armed, and wary, with the monsters and the environment that we're dealing with every day.
This anthology series is not the last of its kind. This unique, bannered, hidden advocacy for social awareness will not stop even if the course is finished, and hopefully, this will spark more ideas and stories to tell that still center on the point of consciousness.
Becoming Filipino is to tell, and narrate stories of freedom and resistance.