Roqué Marcelo Film Retrospective

A Sense of Adventure In Motion

The final look at my creative output is a lingering backward glance at some of the films I have made. Including my work during my college days as a video and film major and what followed after, I have now made over fifty short films. The COVID pandemic, oddly enough, was the catalyst behind this. There was nothing else to do with my pent-up energy at the time. My Asian immersion into filmmaking progressed while the world shut down.

I basically followed my personal interests and curiosities, and various questions floated around in my brain.

What does a live-action poem look like?

What if I filmed something with my miniature piano collection?

What if I followed my instincts completely even if it only made sense to me?”

Looking back, I can see that every film I have completed was made with a sense of adventure. Each time, I was trying out something I had not taken on before and proceeded almost impulsively.

One such film is a piece I called The Dance of the Burden. I molded it together as my own live-action poem with layers of words, costuming, imagery, special visual effects, an original piano composition, vocal harmonies, and dance. (Extra musical production by my friend HP was a big help.)

The adventurous part for me was the dance. This is an element I have always wanted to integrate into my work, and this piece was a seed planted in that fresh, untouched soil. Foreboding and lush, I filmed this along the creek by my house in the woods of Tennessee and inside a graveyard of fallen trees. The closing credit sequence might be my favorite of all the ones I have done so far.

It is no secret that I am a diehard piano enthusiast. I have a small collection of miniature grand pianos to prove it. In my film Pianos Dancing, I took on the challenge of stop-motion filming. This took many hours to create, and each frame was a photograph I took with my camera. These pianos were moved incrementally for every shot. In the thick of it all, I almost gave up because it was so much work.

Filmed entirely on top of my desk in my studio, I recorded an original piano piece for this project and used a lot of lighting to give it more of a vintage, old-world feel. I danced the heck out of those pianos.

Back in college, I was given an assignment to film a conversation between two entities. It could have been a dialogue between two humans, animals, or even inanimate objects. I took the assignment as an opportunity to build a narrative purely out of my own guttural predilections, even if it did not make sense to anyone else. Truth be told, YUP is actually the first part of a trilogy in which everything becomes illuminated in the sequels, more or less. In any case, this is the most adventurous film I have made up until now. Beyond writing the script, I also choreographed the dancing and oversaw the costuming and art direction. I wrote the song “Wah Wah Wah Wah”specifically for this film. This nonsensical, absurdist romp was a piece I needed to make. It was a lesson in trusting my instincts without any second guessing.

It is a surprise to me that a film I made about colonialism and Thanksgiving in America is the most viewed of all my productions. At 71,000 views (and counting) on my YouTube channel, it is a gift that keeps on giving. I want to make more films about colonialism that occurred in the past and instances of it that exist in the present day. This film has been a gateway into those realms.

Lastly, the most personal and tender-hearted of all my films is a documentary I filmed and produced for my thesis project as a student in the Honors College where I got my film degree. Embracing the Ephemeral was a quiet and understated exploration into the nature of assimilation across generations of Filipino immigrants in Middle Tennessee. It looked at the trajectories of my own family and those of two other Filipinos.

A cultural heritage will disappear over time if we let it. I made this film as a way to fight this forgetting.

I chose these five works to look back on specifically because they each point in the direction I want to take my filmmaking in the future. Adventurous and instinctual experimentation, dance, lush imagery, tender emotion, dynamic musicality, and conflicts within human culture are all elements that call to me in various ways.

Whatever my future as a filmmaker holds, I want to learn and grow as an artist along the way and make films I am proud of.

Next Friday, September 1, I take on my newest film project with a small crew of fellow filmmakers.

The adventure continues.

---

I have previously mentioned that I have been toiling away at a small gardening project. My Japanese-inspired tea garden has slowly been taking shape over this past summer. I have cleared a lot of overgrowth and weeds. Slate and stones have been gathered. Small trees and some ground covers have been planted. As the weather cools down this fall, much more work will happen.

I decided to spend some quiet time in my tea garden over the past week without working. I simply sat and looked around. I felt a little bit of pride over how much I had done and some excitement over what is to come. Gardens have been the exclusive purview of my partner and my mom, but I am happy to finally create a natural space of my own. I am envisioning shapes and textures here and there and a peaceful, meditative vibe that I want to take a stab at molding. We should always take the time to dwell within a space of our own making.