Ciencia Ficción: La creatividad de un artista

Now Pablo Riquelme tells us about his movie "Ciencia Ficción: La creatividad de un artista":

Most of the short film was filmed over the course of 3 days. It takes place in the living room of a house, where the the main character has his old typewriter. Roberto (the screenwriter) has to write a script of another genre different from sci fi, but the monsters in his wardrobe won't let him. The monsters want to prevent him from losing his creativity. Apart from the action that takes place in the house, Roberto has two dream-like scenes that take place in a beach and a mansion. These scenes took one day to film. So the filming was four days.

I wanted to make this film because I love B movies. I grew up watching "Critters", "The Fog", "Night of the Creeps"... but in Spain, scifi seems to be neglected. With this short film I wanted to criticize this situation. The main character is a scifi screenwriter whose been forced to write other genres by his producer. The main character has to decide if he's going to write what the industry wants for him, or on the other hand, write about what he really likes.

I believe it's important to mention the creation of the monsters that appear in the film. They were made using the technique of Stop Motion animation. This is the kind of animation used by the famous Ray Harryhausen B movies, responsible for skeletons, giant octopuses and many other creatures. I think this short film is different to the typical short film!

There are many anecdotes about the filming, but in my opinion the most interesting one is the fact that the two main characters were never together on set, due to scheduling problems. So they filmed their parts on separate days, although in the short film looks like they are together. They say something similar happened with the Pacino-De Niro scene in "Heat" (Michael Mann, 1995).

The budget of film was of 9.000€ (11.000 $ aprox.). We made this film thanks to the collaboration of many private companies that decided to help and contribute. In Spain there are two ways of making films: You can wait be subsidized by the government or you can look for private investors, like we did. Sometimes, subsidized films don't finish filming or end up being canceled in post-production...

 
We filmed with the RED ONE camera. Thanks to the High Definition image of the RED ONE offers a lot of freedom in post-production. We filmed with a very neat photography, with a lot of white. In the post-production stage we were free to lower the level of white and darken the blacks and give the image a greenish tone, the color that better chows the essence of scifi. We didn't use 35 mm for two reasons: In the first place, because we had a low budget. In second place, because the quality of shooting digital is arguably better than that of film.

As for the distribution film, is changing. The distributors have to develop if they want to keep up. The audience doesn't see films, they devour them. They are demanding the films now, but people don't want to wait until films arrive to their countries or don't want to pay 20$ for a film. For some distributors streaming might be the answer... There are many new ways of distribution. I still buy films, many of them, in fact. But I admit I look for cheap DVD's.

Watch short film: