By: Alec Figuracion
I’m a graphic designer and an award-winning filmmaker as a director, writer, and editor for film, music videos, digital ads, and online content. My works in narrative feature films have been exhibited in local and international film festivals, including the Busan International Film Festival, Osaka Asian Film Festival, and Cape Town Film Market and Festival.
Currently, I am working as a Senior Visual Designer at Lutron Electronics, and I am also a freelancer who works in motion, publication, branding, and exhibition design. I have designed books or publications for the Whitney ISP 2024 exhibition, Savage Mind, a Filipino independent bookstore and publishing house, and Ateneo de Naga University Press, the leading publisher of Bicolano (of the Bicol Region) studies and literature, amongst other regional writings in the Philippines.I am currently working with an organization in the Philippines on a photography project that highlights notable explorers.
This particular transition from filmmaking to graphic design has been and remains challenging for me. I don’t fit perfectly in the traditional career model, and I still sometimes don’t know where and how to situate myself as someone who just likes making things. With my seemingly fragmented background, I often ask myself if I should just pick one—be a filmmaker or a graphic designer? Can I be a generalist instead who shifts between film and design? Or better yet, maybe become highly specialized in motion graphics—which makes sense in this film-to-design transition?
But the way this conundrum has shaped me is that I became more focused on finding the porous relationships between different media. I am particularly well-versed in motion graphics, which is a direct application of my knowledge and skills in storytelling, editing, and narrative pacing. However, I also like making static work—books, posters, branding, etc. But in all these things that I do, I try to approach them with what galvanized my filmmaking career: storytelling. After all, what are stories if not the art of communicating and provoking imagination? For me, that is filmmaking and graphic design.
One thing that I try to carry over from cinema to graphic design is its inherent function not just to tell stories, but also its capacity to move and the visual poetry allowed in the medium. I am still trying to reconcile what this means as a defined practice, but that’s how I want to continue doing work.
The one project that galvanized this interest is a short film/video essay I made about my grandmother called Sugar Glass. I wanted the film to be in honor of her, of her memory, of the stories she used to tell me when I was young, and of storytelling in and of itself. It’s in the split-screen format, and spliced together using personal photographs, archival videos, and studio footage I shot. The film hopes to present that the memories we frequently revisit and the iterations of the stories we tell ourselves and each other are always in states of malleability. It also aims to depict the nature of memories and stories—constantly being remembered, reconstructed, and retold.
I then decided to take this idea further into my thesis, Soft Procedures, where I use softness to explore concepts of memory, narrative, and politics through the lens of the moving image and graphic design. Here, I argue for uncertainty, haziness, and the lack of resolution as a methodology, not as a weakness.
Looking forward into the future, the ultimate goal is to build my studio—perhaps it could also be a production company at the same time—back home in the Philippines. But in the immediate future, alongside continuing to work on book and publication design, it would be incredible to get my hands on making film title sequences and visual identities for films. It would be lovely to continue developing my artistic work as well.
