Inside ‘Shooting Stars’: A New Cross-Platform P-Pop Competition Show
Shooting Stars is a new, cross-platform, immersive P-Pop competition that is challenging the way we consume entertainment. Inspired by both K-Pop and P-Pop talent competitions, Shooting Stars explores the journey of 20 contestants who showcase their musical prowess in the hopes of forming the next P-Pop group. The show is a collaboration between Australian group Kookaburra Records, local theatre company Mahiwaga St., and filmmaker Brandon Relucio.
This innovative production is dubbed an “unreality” TV show, combining a scripted plot with many layers of improvisation and audience interaction and mixing various forms of media to tell a complex but cohesive story. The whole journey was filmed in front of a live audience at the PETA Theater Center last May 3 but the show is being released as five individual episodes online every week, culminating in a grand finale. The staggered release schedule provides an opportunity for a wider audience to engage with the story and to react to every development as it unfolds.
TheaterFansManila.com sat down with Adrienne Vergara and siglo, the directors of Shooting Stars, to discuss the evolution of this unique project.
How Inspiration Struck
“We wanted to create a project that’s durational in nature,” shared siglo, “So, of course, everything is durational. But in theater cultures, especially in the west, they may refer to it as duration and it’s really the lengthy ones that extend four hours to eight hours, etc, sometimes even 24 hours.”
Three years ago, they began brainstorming with writers David Finnigan and Sam Burns-Warr and filmmaker Brandon Relucio on what they could do. They realized that they were fascinated by K-Pop and P-Pop, watching K-Pop documentaries and following a lot of talent competitions like American Idol, Starstruck, and Star Circle Quest. They recognized the potential for crafting a durational performance, following the format of a musical talent show and the seeds for Shooting Stars were sown.
The team behind Shooting Stars also wanted to raise the stakes of the story by adding elements of tense rivalry and cutthroat competition, reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Squid Game, which had gained more and more popularity as they were developing the story.
Vergara talked about how they landed on the final concept after initially considering something a tad more violent. “Let’s create a new P-Pop group, an idol group. I think that’s a good idea. So ganun siya nag-start, and instead of them killing each other, they’re really competing to be part of this next gen of a group. But at the same time, we’re also exposing and tackling different issues in the creative industry, the entertainment industry, and what’s going on behind all those, you know, the K-Pop groups and competitions.”
So they started putting together a script, creating the characters and plotting out their arcs. The process became more collaborative because the members of the cast also co-wrote their parts and had active roles in devising their characters. The director would give them prompts to work on and they would come back to rehearsals, having done their homework to build their characters.
Vergara and siglo also used their experiences as contestants on reality shows like Family Feud to inform their process of filming all the episodes live in one day. The “unreality” aspect of the show — it’s being based on reality shows but being scripted — was also inspired by wrestling programs and siglo’s knowledge and experience as a ring announcer for the Manila Wrestling Federation came in handy here as well.
From Physical to Digital
Vergara broke down the experience of Shooting Stars: “So, we have the live show. We have the pre-filmed clips, the backstage parts, and then the third plane: we have the online performance. So, the characters have their own Instagram and Facebook accounts. Some of them also have their own Tiktok accounts. You may follow them, you may stalk them, you can be either a fan or a basher in the comment section.”
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Two sets of audiences will experience Shooting Stars in a different way. The live audience would have marathoned the entire journey in one day, watching the whole story unfold live over the course of several hours. While the online audience will be experiencing the show through weekly installments.
“Now, the online audience, merong sense na ‘what will happen next week?’ so at least they have a sense of build up, building the relationship with the characters before they drop to the next episode the following week,” siglo said, “Yeah, sure, they can also marathon it, after presenting all the episodes in the coming weeks. But if you’re really a regular watcher or a regular audience member, you get to have that kind of feeling that Shooting Stars unfolded, talaga na parang reality TV, as it happened, in succession.”
The team also made sure to brief the live audience properly to prevent them from leaking spoilers after the show. And so far, everyone has been compliant and has preserved the experience for the online audience.
A ‘Mahiwagical’ Experience
Inevitably, Shooting was always going to challenge the status quo because it comes from Mahiwaga St., an art collective that explores ‘chimera’ performances.
“So, it’s really mixing much of the lion, the goat, and the serpent,” siglo shared, “May ganon kaming fascination with different forms, and not only just static or conventional forms of performances, like theater, dance or television, etc, minsan we also incorporate karaoke, tarot readings, soon we’ll have a test of a DnD [Dungeons and Dragons] one-shot in one of our performances. We’re really happy to jam as artists in the projects that we’re making.”
Innovative projects like Shooting Stars are meant to invite audiences to “jam” with other art forms and to find some sense of harmony amid the complexity and chaos of everyday life. Vergara adds that Mahiwaga St. aims to provide “mahiwagical” space for audiences to “play with a sense of wonder and surprise.”
“There’s always that magical aspect in performances, may it be live theater, maybe in film, or even in [television] series, those hiwaga moments, those hiwaga spaces. So we hope the audience could be charmed or enthralled or ma-encanto by that world,” said Vergara.
Mahiwaga St. firmly believes in the power of art, in its many forms, to bring people of diverse backgrounds together, to sing the same song or root for the same characters. Shooting Stars is just the beginning of this mission to spirit audiences away to new worlds of art and magic.
Here is the link to their official website.
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