Avid a good time

Avid Liongoren has just saved the human race from a horde of evil rabbits.

After this crimefighting spree, thankless and unbeknownst to the rest of the working world sleepwalking on speed, he tumbles into a chair and in one endless breath tells me about his work as director of innovative music videos, designer of graphics-intensive campaigns, and illustrator of scary children’s tales, pausing only to munch on adobo flakes. Avid is your basic all-around new media ninja, and like most geeks, he wears his geekiness with the pride of misunderstood comic book heroes. "I actually really enjoy rendering," he says excitedly, peering into an imaginary line his finger traces across the air, recalling sleepless nights spent bathed in the etherworldly glow of Adobe software.

We pre-meet at Starbucks, but as a social commentary quickly ditched the foisters of fraudulent frappes and head to the less hegemonic food court. Avid is a walking, talking little riot of vivid color and curious, infectious expression. He first complains about the dys-punctual industry higher-ups who treat him with little respect and keep bumping him off schedule. Those bastards, I concur, but perhaps it may have a little something to do with one’s appearance? Spiky-wristed, sneaker-warped and Waolverine-tagged, Avid looks, in all respects, like the boy who just stepped out of a rave, blinking into the unwelcome dawn of corporate adulthood. Despite his tiny frame and enviously fast metabolism however, Avid is no lightweight rookie dealer in the image-pushing industry. With ten music videos and a cache of commercial print and web work under his baggy pants-cinching belt, he is quite the accomplished artiste for a mere 23-year old, definitely able to command larger sums of money than I, as novice pusher of words can ever hope, as well as make local divas of the recording industry break a sweat – sometimes.

He once had to do a video for a four-month pregnant Jessa Zaragosa. To hide the consumer-unsightly condition, the video was shot very darkly and with her usually behind a food-laden buffet table that accented her heaving bosom instead. It was a simple enough, Chocolat-inspired concept – waiting woman unfailingly and tragically makes dinner every night for a mysterious someone who never shows up. Two locations, and as most films are made, shot non-chronologically. But the entire shoot had to be re-moved and rescheduled around the hormonal Jessa who refused to do a different scene which required her hair down on the same day, "kasi mawawala 'yung body".

Then there was the Carlos Agassi video that never was. Avid was quite geared up to direct a Janet Jackson-inspired cartoony video of the notoriously unlistenable Boracay Baby, a song I’ve actually only heard too much about. The video was meant to involve a lot of computer-animated beach, a fat Diether who got all the chicks, and an initially rejected Carlos who eventually wins over the babes by beating down a giant alien slug with an eggplant in hand. And did the studmuffin Agassi dare serve himself up in this brand of kitschy, talong-in-cheek self-deprecating humor? The idea was nixed in its purple-skinned bud. Did he perhaps feel that arming himself with an aubergine was somewhat, er, gay?

I asked Avid about his own uncanny ability to swing both ways. He can make dark, grunge-ridden rock videos with an angst reminiscent of 1993. But he can equally make happy, perky pop videos in pastel hues and doe-eyed filters. He absolutely has no problem with this. "I’m half gay!" he exclaims, swatting the air with a pseudo-limp wrist. "I love going to Freeway, pulling out clothes and matching accessories for the girls! I know what makes them look pretty." Avid has been Nina’s official videographer since her debut on the scene. Finding out he made the uber-girly, little shop of florals Foolish Heart and the award-winning, dirty Motakka by Cheese took a bit of mental reconciliation on my part.

I mention that the jagged stop-motion animated look of the Cheese video was stylistically similar to a funked-up but defunct video project of Dino Ignacio’s I was supposed to be part of. His eyes gape open in a slapshock of recognition. "Oh my god, I was there! That experience with Dino was what inspired me to start making videos in the first place. You’re the Slapshock girl!" he points in happy accusation. Strange mobius twists of coincidence, so very Manila. "Haha, I saw you in your undies!" Avid adds, tee heeing half gayly. At the time, I had probably mistaken him for one of the sullen band members who kept insisting on having a smoke. It was a rather embarrassing moment for me, a non-actor confronted for the first time with an entirely blank white background, having to wear a bathing suit and "pretend" to be trapped inside a giant eyeball while flying man-bats swooped all around.

But that’s showbiz. A Visual Communication Arts graduate of UP ("I’m makabayan all the way"), Avid claims that everything he knows about video making, he actually learned from MTV. "Making the Video" can surprisingly offer, to the trained eye, an art school education’s worth of filmmaking hints and tips. The whole slow-mo hair-blow choppy dance move trick? Learnt from TLC. A sped up, slowed down or backwards version of the song must be learned by the artist in advance, so that on filming day he/she will be able to sing and dance like the Chipmunks but with a straight face. The sequence is then shot at either a faster or slower frame rate, and from there you can generate all kinds of groovy effects.

"Making the Video" however doesn’t show how much blood, sweat and beers are spent in post-production. It always looks like "and here’s one premiere video we prepared earlier!" as the whiz kids whip out their magic tape from behind secret digital doors, handing it over to Hype Williams. Most videos nowadays are shot almost entirely with just a green screen and some dance moves, and entire imagined worlds are pixeled on later. The distance between reality and representation is completely blown apart, and all that is left are shards of suspension, disbelief to the nth degree. Some videos show off too much sci-fancy gimmickry, eschewing substance for simulacra. Low-end boybands who cover new wave hits and feature lots of inane spaceships in their videos come to mind.

But Avid Liongoren, though part of the new breed of maverick, XL1-toting digital worldmakers, still tells stories from the heart. He keeps it simple, childlike almost with childhood’s necessary twist of evil – fairy tales from the crypt. For instance, the video he made for the Christian boyband 17:28 was another darkly lit production with no synchronized steps, no glitter, no "Cariah Mary." Inspired by the Sixth Sense, the boys are all seen moping around the house and other usual haunts. A girl hangs around them, but is always being ignored and having doors slammed in her face. Her family eats dinner without her, much to her chagrin. Ay, si dead pipol. After viewing, the head-scratching record execs asked if it could be altered so that the boys were making her ligaw instead. Eh, patay siya! Avid staunchly defended his piece, saying that there’s nothing morbid about a deceased girl unable to deal, and that viewers will appreciate this edgy twist to an already formulaic and otherwise dorky band.

This is the real fine art Avid has learned working in the industry – that of a grudgingly respectful compromise between artistic integrity and commercial needs, without diluting one’s vision, and without alienating a general audience who, after all, are supposed to want to run out and buy a record selling number of CDs and cassettes after watching a really cool video ad infinitum et nauseam. Rock bands naturally give lighter reign over their videos – pigs heads, pigs blood, messy hair – pour it on! The problem would rather be that a lot of rockers are actually quite camera shy. Put them in a blank studio and they freeze up, they need to feed on the human blood of a live audience. Some don’t even want to be seen at all, ala Pearl Jam in their post-"Ten" days. And look what happened to them.

It’s all about selling yourself. After hearing Avid’s Carlos and Jessa horror stories, I ask him if there’s anybody he wouldn’t do? He shakes his ponytail, adjusts the strategic strand of hair strewn across his cheek and tiny fairybots fly for cover. "I’m a directing whore!" He loves the entire style spectrum from camp to creep. The project he’s currently working on is another Nina video. I glimpse embryonic frames. Flashes of Nina walking around rather stupidly against a nothing blue. Then, the magic. Flashes of Nina walking around rather beautifully in a liquid candy landscape and teddy bear skies. It’s Tim Burton on ecstasy, and Jack Skellington is made out of lollipops.

Avid says the record labels never give him big budgets, but he has learned to defy expectations and produce visually misleading masterpieces which blow them away. It’s all in the mind and in the imagination, the rest resides in the long rendering hours of translation to screen. Avid does live in a world different from our own, he views life through Atari-tinted lenses where aliens are always threatening to break out in invasion, where sea green slugs lurk beneath every surface, where lost little kitty cats mewl their wounded way back home. Avid will always be the little boy who’s never stopped dreaming and doodling. The money he makes just goes to buying more toys, of which he’s already got a formidable action-figure amount, horded like warriors and perched like gargoyles over his workstation. My last question, inevitably, is "so would you ever direct a bold movie (as is the trend with young indie filmmakers nowadays)?" He does not hesitate. "No way! I would never be able to show it to my mom!"