When musician Adrian Garcia was listening to “Song of the Lake” by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, he couldn’t have predicted how it would change his career.
With the snap decision to record a cover of the tune and film a music video, Garcia realized art can be created on a whim.
“It was just like a spark,” said Garcia. “I opened my eyes the next day, and suddenly all these things were just naturally put in motion.”
The video — which is among the more than two dozen entries at this week’s Miami Filmgate festival — was filmed in downtown Miami and stars Garcia as two separate characters, a man and a mythological character with antlers, who both are experiencing internal struggles as they walk along the seemingly empty city.
At three minutes and 38 seconds, the video was released by Garcia’s band “PANS,” though it was more of a solo project. This being the first cover he’s done, Garcia knew the song choice would have to be special.
“I was really inspired by that song,” said Garcia. “I was going through some tough times and that song gave me that push to do my own cover.”
His video and the others will be shown at the Filmgate Music Video Festival on Thursday at the Miami Beach Bandshell at 6:30 p.m. The event is open to the public, with tickets priced at $17.50 through Wednesday and $21.50 on the day of the festival.
The festival features original music videos filmed in Florida from Florida directors. Garcia’s video is competing against 27 others, which range in music and style, for the award of “Best Music Video of the Night,” to be chosen by a group of six judges.
Among the other videos is the electronic song “FunkyJam DiscoMist,” by Udachi, which features footage from “Skate Love Barcelona,” an international festival that celebrates roller skating. The music video for “Heaven is a hotel room” by Rick Guerre will also be premiering; it commemorates a time from Guerre’s anniversary with his wife at a hotel.
“There’s no rule to the music video medium, you can get really experimental and it produces a lot of different results,” said Michelle Hung, the operations manager for Filmgate Miami, a non-profit organization that aims to provide local artists with a platform to share their work.
“It’s like a great collection of different essences in creativity from all around Miami,” Hung added. “It’s such a big sandbox to play with in the music video genre.”
Filmgate Miami is also collaborating with the Rhythm Foundation for the festival, another non-profit organization that focuses on creating events that promote diversity in South Florida.
For Garcia, it wasn’t long after first listening to the original song that he started recording the cover and creating a vision for a video that would compliment the music.
“He wanted to show a man and his relationship with creativity, with letting go of ideas and turning them into art,” said Juan Ricardo Yilo, the editor of the video. “It’s almost like coexisting with that beast inside that wants to create and express itself.”
The decision to portray the characters in an empty city was spur of the moment. Once the crew looked back at the shots and saw that Garcia’s characters were the only people shown, they realized it fit the theme of displaying turmoil in a city that seemed dystopian.
“It turned out great because we somehow avoided capturing any cars or any other people on the streets, even though we were in the middle of downtown Miami,” said April Nicole, the director.
In the video, the mythological character receives two notes that invoke despair and longing. The first reads “You’re getting old,” while the second one states “Don’t end up broke and alone.”
Garcia improvised a key scene in the video when his mythological character points to his reflection while looking at a mirror before grabbing the mirror and shaking it in frustration.
“A lot of the way the video came out was kind of a bit of a happy accident and me just doing things on the spot,” said Garcia. “I loved that shot because it was me trying to remind myself who I am and remind myself what I’m doing.”
Garcia explains the video’s ambiguous ending, saying in an interview, “I’ve never loved to be too on the nose with things.”
The 33-year-old artist went to New World School of the Arts High School, where he played jazz guitar. After high school, he was inspired to begin creating his own demos by watching the band “Other Lives” open for Radiohead in 2011.
He was accepted into the Music Technology Program at FIU for a semester, where he learned to create algorithmic compositions using laptops. It was there that he met Jack Le Sante, who would later become the guitar player for “PANS.”
By 2014, their indie rock band “PANS” was formed and chose their name based on the concept of “panspermia,” a theory that life is present throughout the universe and can be spread through comets, asteroids and space dust, among other things.
“After looking back at the video, it shows a bit of that surrender of continuing to feed that sort of machine that never stops,” said Garcia, whose video has 1,000 views on Youtube and the same number of streams on Spotify. “That has become my reality and what fuels me artistically.”
