The last weekend I had the pleasure and honour of being part of Richmond 48 Hours Film Project. This is a competition where the premise is to create a film in 48 hours. It is aimed to film making students and film lovers in general and I was invited to join by my good old adventure partner Jason van Gumster. Of course, everybody competes with a film with real actors and cameras and stuff… and we are always the black sheep, the crazy nuts that decided to make … a 3D animation!

So, let’s put it clearly, our goal was to do a 3D short movie in 48 hours, out of the blue, no textures, no sets, no script, not even a genre !. Genre is given to us on friday and once we have it we start to work on the script.

Local team gathers at Casa de Jason (sic) and work there whole 48 hours while International Team is spread all around the globe and works via internet like me. We use IRC to communicate and understand what we have to do, and this time we also used Tinychat which let us see our faces ! … not mine since I don’t have a webcam, but at least I could watch the other guys.
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Yeah !, now it’s official, Bassam’s project “Tube” was unveiled ! After the 48 hours of Jasonville (like the 48 hours of LeMans race but crazier) we all felt it was a great team and that we should do something together again… well “together” in my case means 10.000 miles away, using a crappy internet connection… but what the heck !

So here we are. I cannot say too much about the story, is about drugs, sex and rock’n'roll … wait, there is no sex really… and no drugs… at least in the story … oh let me check the script again…

OK OK, got it… It is about Gilgamesh and a subway… damn, I think … I think… WE NEED A SCRIPT ! WHAT THE HECK WAS BASSAM THINKI… oh sorry, the mic was open… errr… CLIC.

Jokes apart, it’s great pleasure for me to be part of this team, and I hope to give something worthy to the project, clearly humour is not my stronger area, so I better do something else…

Of course, we will be blogging about everything…

We’ve been dreaming about making a short movie for months. We put ideas, dreams, images in the Licuadora and sometimes something interesting gets out if it… some new tasty cocktail. And that’s how “The Mercator Project“ started. Some background: an image I was making and never finished, an obsession about the sea and lighthouses, several sleepless nights and long talks with friends, and the Licuadores always ready to ship on chimerical crusades like this one.

Come and see ladies and gentleman, a new project that sees the light of the day, please be gentle and don’t be too noisy, it is shy and it has just given its first steps…“The Mercator Project” a movie about Love, Death, Poetry and Madness.

If you live in Argentina and are older than…I mean… you are grown ups, you might recall Tiburón (Shark), Delfín (Dolphin) and Mojarrita (little river fish God knows how’s traslated to english but sounds funny in spanish), the so called “Superagents” who did around eleven movies in the 70’s. A couple of weeks ago I went to the premiere of “Superagents: Next Generation”, directed by our well known Daniel DeFelippo (director of Plumíferos), and introducing several local stars like Fabian Giannola and Darío Lopilato among others (click on picture for bigger version).

This is not a paparazzi’s blog so you might wonder what the heck is this about. Thing is we made all digital effects for the movie in our new “studio” with my old comrades Iván & Manuel … and of course using Blender. There were some interesting weeks, visting film sets, wandering around cameras and spotlights, and taking lots of pictures. It was particullarly fun to see people’s reaction when we took pictures of mirroring balls and other weird stuff except the movie stars !

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