Alpas: Short Film and Website Featuring My Poems

The following is a revision of my LinkedIn post earlier today:

First, congratulations to InnTechGreat, a group of Bachelor in Multimedia Arts students at FEU Institute of Technology for their successful final thesis defense recently. Secondly, thanks to them for choosing my poems as material for their thesis on how to promote Philippine poetry via multi-media arts.

And their thesis is Alpas, a 1) "live-action and hybrid animated short film showcasing the art of poetry" (again, "incidentally," my poems) and 2) an accompanying website of a collection of (more) poems from the same poet (and, again "incidentally," it's yours truly).

The film's current version, November 2022.

The film’s story is about “a young adult writer trying to overcome his past trauma through writing poems,” and weaves through my three previously published poems. Below are the poems and the respective times when each appears in the film, with links to the original pages where they were first published):

• 04:39: First Shot of the Philippine-American War - Unlikely Stories Mark V, July 18, 2019 (This poem, for this film, was slightly revised from the original for historical accuracy and posterity.),
• 08:01: Because fighting was his element - I am not a silent poet, August 21, 2016, and
• 10:28: The Insignificant Other - Small Orange poetry journal and its first anthology, 2020.

Screenshot of website's homepage.

The website features my politically-oriented poems – all previously published, with the exception of one, in literary magazines and/or my first full-length poetry collection, "Metro Manila Mammal" (Soma Publishing, 2018). Here's the link to the sole exception, Atty. Hermon C. Lagman:, a rhyming quatrain in Filipino that I wrote last September in time for the 50th anniversary of the declaration of martial law in the Philippines. It is about a prominent human rights abuse/enforced disappearance victim during that dark era under the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

The film can also be accessed through the website’s homepage.

And previously, I talked about this project in part 1 of my interview (October 3, 2022) with Thomas White for his poetry mini interviews blog.

Note: Both the film and the website are still works in progress. The panelists advised the students to make a few revisions on the film, and the website is still incomplete (a few credits are still missing, among others). Thank you and ever onwards for humanity – and poetry!