Updated Portfolio – 2014

It was about time!

Check my new pictures on my Portfolio.

Buda Castle 3D Tour video – 2014

The visitors of Buda Castle in Budapest (Hungary) could enjoy a cinema projection of a 3D tour of the castle showing how the castle was in ancient times.
The film was translated to multiple languages, and a friend of mine asked me to put the Spanish voice for it.
Recorded in my own home, at the quietest times, the outcome was surprisingly rewarding (not economically though).
I have not yet been in Budapest, but sure I will try to visit the Buda Castle and get into the projection room with my headphones set to Spanish!

Bergtoys – Audio – 2013/2014

During the last year I have worked on multiple Bergtoys commercial videos putting the voice to the video presenter.
Note the fast speed that my voice goes. The original video is in Dutch, and I found that in Spanish we trend to have longer words to say the same. So every sentence was about one to five seconds longer in Spanish.
After quite some breathing effort, having a dry throat, skilful editing, and creative translations, the outcome is pretty cool

Breakfast – Backflop 2013

The main short we did in 2013 was Breakfast. Based on a true story someone once told me during a night out. 

We filmed this short in two days and in about 4 locations. The most complicated takes were on the bed scene. Limited by the space and the technicalities of “what parts of the body we could show”, we looked for angles and positions that could still show the tricky situation the two characters had gone through, without having the freedom to move the camera around, or to show how nude the girl really was.

Due to time pressure, my takes in the last scene were very limited, so quite some editing magic was key to save what we had.
And last but not least, we had a composer! Steve Garbade provided a nice soundtrack based on the early takes. It made the film take a new dimension that I initially did not foresee. Considering we worked remotely, it was a nice work that we put together.

the Cat – 2012

I got in contact with a PhD student (Giannicola Scarpa) who was aiming to make a short about quantum mechanics for a competition. He came with quite an interesting script and he was so enthusiastic that I could not refuse the chance to collaborate in the project.

I lend him all most of my equipment, and worked together to complete the project within a week. Gianni was the writer, director, part-time camera and editor.

I acted in the film as Erwin and I helped with the camera whenever I was not in front of it.

The result is pretty interesting and the story works very well as a whole. Deniz playing in her first short was great. We are hopping she will play in some of Backflop shorts soon.

We are NOT Mexican (Part II) – Backflop 2012

This second part was filmed in parallel with the first, and in fact, some sequences were filmed before we completed the first part due to the multiple locations.

Issues with the wind on location forced us to voice over the entire sequence outside the car, adding all required sound effects for it.

We found very difficult to find a place where 3 masked men could do this kind of stuff without dragging the attention from the general public, so we had to chose a week-end day on a business area hoping not to appear on CCTV cameras.

We had lots of issues on how to fake a car driving a relatively high speed and making some believeable act for the body to fall out of the car… Well we rely on the fact that the viewer recreates more in his mind that the reality he can see…

It was a tough editing job to reduce the overall time to just above 4:30 minutes, as we started with around 6 minutes for this part. Some dialog was reduced and the action was shortened.

Having shot the first sequence as one single sequence made the edition almost impossible. The pace was not fast enough, finally I gave up and added two cuts to make it faster.

I hope you enjoy the result.

We are NOT Mexican – Part I – Backflop 2012

Finally we managed to complete our last short, a 2 part story about three luchadores (Mexican Wrestlers) who are NOT Mexican.

The story turns around the night preceding Escorpion last fight before retirement. Events will turn out for the worse.

This was the most complex project we have completed, with multiple locations, three different actors, a complex story, moving cars, dangerous stunts, and lots of props.

The worse part was the sound. Like other times before, we failed to have a good recording, so big part of both chapters is voiced over, adding lenghty sessions to cover the full set of dialog.

The filming took three full days, working always against the clock. Plus, having people with masks in cars brings quite some police attention. That is the reason for the inhabited backgrounds, and also because they fit the story.

All In – Backflop 2011

This is a short I wrote, filmed, edited, and directed. I decided not to act here as we did not have a team to take care of the equipment, sound, etc… basically we were two behind the camera and 3 to 4 in front of it. Quite a challenge. I tried to create a sober atmosphere with the lighting I had.

The story is inspired by the song “el Tahur” by los Tigres del Norte, and also by an actual story that took place in India.

The film was shot in two days, to allow the actors enough time to rest, as well as to have many takes of the same part. The actors were new to this, so it was easier this way to ensure we had some acceptable takes.

We also messed up with the sound on the first scene, which we had to fix through voice over. Due to the “croupier” actor being on holidays I put my voice for him. My Italian accent was not great, but it was short enough to be acceptable.

Citas Maripuri – 2011

I got a new MacBook Pro, so I was playing with it, and when I started a camera program that came with the computer, I was delighted… So I started talking to the camera in my native language (Spanish) as if I was in a dating site.

Also to try it out I wanted to use imovie, for very quick editions so this is the result.

So far it has been the funniest thing I have ever done for the Spanish public, although I have to say I haven’t done much for the Spanish public, or any public in general.

Midnight Cookie – Backflop 2011

After a few months of innactivity, we were joined by Justin Baker, with whom I did some acting class in the past, in order to film a fast pace short without words.

We were aiming to shoot a night like film in a short time and with a limited set of people. However, when I thought of limited set of people I didn’t expect no people at all. We had to put everything together with just three people, including preparing the set, lighting, camera, directing, acting…  When you can’t focus on just one thing, or on just a few, it makes it easy to make mistakes.

Well, I tried to fix some of these issues in post… and it wasn’t easy. Still proud as usual of our result, here you can enjoy some slapstick style comedy.