Childhood games

MANILA, Philippines - Then run in place and explode the confetti all over yourself like sexually.” When I heard assistant director Paolo Apagalang say this, I knew this video shoot had the makings of something else.

Directed and produced by writer Mara Coson, the music video shoot for Ang Bandang Shirley’s song Patintero was held at an empty field across One Esplanade near the pier. It was a one-take shoot that brought to life the nostalgia of how patintero was the game of choice in most schoolyards and streets when we were kids, given a piece of chalk. “It was more of an excuse to take my low-art video journal into a grander scale, matched with the saving grace of a really great song by one of my favorite local bands,” admits Coson, who set out, in all comic ambition, to outdo that Brazilian one-take video Oração.

Instead, Coson tweaked things and themes and made it her own, featuring a fun crowd prancing around a raincoated band and hopping on a makeshift patintero mattress. “By directing, I mean, I drew a timed set-up with stick figures and marked the process with an orange colored pencil,” relates Coson. “Then I photocopied and distributed it to my ‘crew’  a mixture of friends and friends’ friends. My producer role mainly involved providing audio, pizza, beer and a tent. And a generator  that was hard.”

And as if all that wasn’t heady enough, SM Mall of Asia’s neon red-clothed marching band had also agreed to join in. Up until this rare gig, the marching band had only played within SM Mall of Asia’s confines. Little did they know that they had stepped into a tastefully unplanned reference to Kanye West’s marching band in Touch the Sky.

At the end of the day, the band hardly let anyone down as it played through a little rain. “Ang Bandang Shirley were kind enough to just rock it up on the day, wear the silly raincoats I found them, and play the notoriously catchy song they do almost too well,” says Coson.

Direk MC: Mara Coson directed and produced Ang Bandang Shirley’s video for Patintero.

The video is obviously a natural fit for what Ang Bandang Shirley has been up to since day one. Having formed in December 2003 in UP Diliman right after the Eraserheads had broken up, a large part of their sound still revolves around both immediate nostalgia and that eternal college kid consciousness, perhaps funneled through indie pop  minus any rock star form.

“The idea behind the video was that I wanted to create something special for New Year’s Day  those feel-good start-of-the-year kind of videos that are simple enough to make you forget whiskey hangovers,” points out Coson. Around the same time Coson was figuring it out, she kept hearing Patintero’s catchiest part: (pa-pa-pa-ra-ra-ra). It was only a matter of time, then, before she realized it was perfect to create something child-like, Patintero being a song about childhood games.

“People have to know that the Grim Repat isn’t there to sit and look pretty, with me leaving a trail of my elbow marks and my lack of Adobe Suite skills,” declares Coson. “So it’s mainly a really rough and simple one-take video with childhood games and happy people. It felt like ‘Wish Ko Lang’ for me, because no one really knew what it was all for but somehow it all worked out as though there had been a reason. It let loose a lot of goosebumps.”

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The video comes out New Year’s Day “right after a missed breakfast and right before lunch” at Mara Coson’s journal, http://thegrimrepat.wordpress.com. You can also follow the band on Twitter at @thebandshirley for album and merch updates.