The ultimate weapon

It's Friday, nearly the weekend, you don't feel like working... If you have been neglecting your reading, now it's a good time to catch up with Calachurras!

The story reaches the point of no return in this exciting Episode 15. May the maker watch over us all.

Reaction

After months working on it, I am struggling to stay focus on the script of my next feature film at the moment. Which is why I thought it would be a great moment to share the link to my last science fiction short film, REACTION. That's right. Hope you enjoy it!



For those speaking Spanish, there is also version with Spanish subtitles. For those speaking other languages, well, good for you. And your CV. Probably. If you do understand English but still enjoy subtitles, click on this one.

Actually -if not anything else- the short it is a good, representative example of what I attempt to achieve in terms of genre and style with the next film. So not completely unrelated.

Writing is procrastinating.

Calachurras - The little weird webcomic

CALACHURRAS is the story -a bit satiric and a bit fantastic- of a few peculiar three-arm beings, a beach and the most strange battle. We launched it about a year ago and it already has got 10 issues, published monthly. We publish it in both Spanish and English too, so that we can piss off as many people as possible.

For those of you who are following it, thank you and hope you are enjoying it. It's our special little weird baby for my brother and me (the Eskimo Effect combo), and we are excited to be able to share this very personal and sometime a bit twisted story with you all.

For those who are NOT yet following (oh, no!!), we have put together a quick guide to make it easier to start reading now. You can stare at it in disbelief right HERE!

May the creator be with you.

What's been happening

So I thought I'd take the time to give a bit of an update on what I've been doing in the last few months (that feel like years!!).

End of last year, I was lucky enough to have a job as an extra (background artist :) in the Captain America movie (!!!!!!). If you want to try and see me :P (I'm one of the blurry dockers in the background) I'm in the official trailer, min 1:36 :) Although it may sound very unimpressive to some, for me it was an incredible experience that felt much too-short, and it leaves me out of breath simply to talk about it. Only Google :) can be more exciting than working in a Hollywood movie + seeing one of the characters I've been reading comics about all my life (Captain America in this case) in the flesh + getting paid for it. Incredible.

Then somehow I ended up directing my first feature film, a drama set in Manchester titled BROTHERS DAY. I'd like to blame my insistence in getting in as much trouble as possible for it, but maybe it was just sheer luck. In any case, it was a lot of fun and hard work. Luckily a strong cast and crew came together in the end and we managed to both pull it off and live through the experience! I did have to put other projects on hold, but it was all worth it. I especially enjoyed working on a feature script which wasn't my own, and working with 2 fantastic writers to make the necessary changes to the story to be able to film it with the given constraints. I just finished filming it, still need to edit it all together and such, but the footage is all in the can (well, all but a couple of days). Sadly, there is very little I can show -well, other than pictures of the shoots-, but I'm working on a trailer and I can't wait to show everybody once it's finished! :)

As if it wasn't enough, I got involved in a movie-to-be called TRAVELER ZERO, a time-travel story... based on real events! :) I only got to do some visual effects and grading for it, but it was particularly thrilling to me because the project is America-based. It's currently been pitched in L.A. to producers with important-sounding names :) and hopefully the whole movie will get to be filmed. You can see the full short film promo below.

At the comic-book side of things, my brother and I have recently re-launched the webseries CALACHURRAS. We are excited to get back to work on this after a bit of a break to give the whole thing all the color that rightfully deserved, and can't wait for you people to read the whole story and tell us what you think.

Last but hardly least, I also went to CANNES this year, for the first time. Cannes is not only a film festival, but a way of seeing the film industry from a more practical angle, and an opportunity to meet a lot of like-minded people and move projects forward. It was a fantastic and necessary experience that I recommend to all my filmmaking friends. It is both fun and a lot of work, and absolutely worth it.

And this is all for now in what's been the most exciting months of my life. A lot of exciting things seems to be happening in the near future too, but I shall talk about them in some other post.

Thanks for reading!

What is CALACHURRAS?

Still making a lot of people guessing, doubting where it's going and just plain making them angry, the uncommon story of Calachurras keeps going and reaches its 5th episode this month (fact of which my bro and me, the Eskimo Effect combo, are chuffed about).

If you have never seen Noses and Ears fight, if you don't know who Mr Progress and Mr Maker are, or have never seen a brave 3-arm creature face a dangerous churra... well, you've never read Calachurras.

Sort it out here! Or not.

Never write on napkins

I realise with horror that I haven't posted any nonsensical posts in nearly 2 weeks. So just a quick one to try and save my soul from the particular circle of hell where all those bloggers who don't write on their blogs for so long rotten in -surely-.

Right now I have several piles of paper of all sorts on my desk. Paper with little notes on it, that is. Torn notepads pages, half-torn notepads pages, post-it notes (in several colours). Supposedly full of powerful ideas for the different comics and films I have in progress, silently looking at me with the promise of something genius. Or at least bearable.

Like the dodgy-looking man in the even dodgier-looking picture.

In fact most of it is just gibberish, or senseless scribbling. Or both. I could probably set the whole pile on fire and I'd never miss it. Oddly, I think I'd probably get some delight out of it too. However, my mind tells me there probably is something of value there. Or something I somehow, at some past point in time, I thought to be valuable. "Why would I spend time on them otherwise?", I reason misleadingly.

The moral would be: set your notes on fire regularly rather than let them taking over most of your space. OR not. Up to you, really. And try and copy those notes into your computer more often. Obvious? Well, next post may make some sense then.

New comic CALACHURRAS!

So here it is finally: our new webcomic CALACHURRAS.

If you think the title is somewhat strange, wait until you see the comic. Calachurras tells the story of a very unusual type of battle, written by yours truly and drawn by my brother, the other Eskimo Effect half.

"Noses and Ears are at war. Will our heroes be able to master the complex folklore of Calachurras before they all end up dead? Or worst still, swept into the darkness by the big wave the profecy talks about?".

Please support this ambitious-ish comic production by SUBSCRIBING to the updates right here or/and/for/by leaving your extremely valued comments on the blog or the Facebook page. Do it soon though, before the Ears are upon us!

Webcomics!

In Eskimo Effect, we keep on going with our crazy, nonsensical production of pretty webcomics. Cristobal-98's latest episode is out (one one more until the end). And Calachurras is coming!

If you enjoy comic-books, or simply the occasional original story (OR you've been wandering around the internet for hours without really doing anything), come visit us! Anyway, that's the message today. Drop by, say hi!

Now you can also subscribe to the updates by email and even join the facebook page/group/thing, so couldn't be easier, really...

Love.

Blake Snyder's "finale"

"I love writers" - Blake Snyder


Blake Snyder, enthusiastic screen writing guru, loving teacher and practical structure genius, died yesterday.

His seminars and his most popular book "Save the Cat" (and the only one I've read, by the way) are said to have inspired and enlightened both budding writers and established professionals. Personally, I learnt a great deal from his approach and found his words extremely useful: an excellent starting point and a light to follow when lost in the dark corridors of your own writing.


Snyder had a blind faith in writers, and an unnatural respect for an audience that, as we all should know, expects to enjoy the film they go to see. He wasn't as popular as Michael Jackson, however, so media coverage have been somewhat moderate. And so I felt I needed to do my bit by posting something here and updating wikipedia (and sobbing a little when no one was looking...). After all, he was in fact "a lot of people's Michael Jackson", and his work means a lot to quite a few of us.


I feel the best way of explaining who he was is to leave a few relevant lines directly extracted from the messages on his blog after his passing.


"We'll never know how many bad movies he saved us from"

"I am starting production this month on my feature film that wouldn’t be happening if not for Blake’s book"

"This is very sad. Blake was one of the good guys. Shared his knowledge with everyone and anyone. He’d actually email you back if you had a question"

"Blake was a great writing teacher and the first person who really got me to understand structure, but more importantly he was a really nice man and seemed genuinely interested in his students"

"Blake, you saved more than just a cat my friend. I will truly miss you"

"This reminds me that there is no tomorrow. Only today. Make the most of it"


Which takes me to the end of this post. Whatever and however small it may be, let our work on stories be the best ongoing tribute to his life we could possibly offer.

Damn, Blake, I miss you too, and I never even met you.

The joys of feedback

Interestingly, sometimes people see films in a radically different way. Just yesterday, I got a completely different perception of Dan Brown's latest film adaptation to those of the two friends I watched it with (fact which incidentally led to quite an enjoyable debate).

It's not surprising that the feedback I'm receiving from the people that are kindly reading the shortfilm I'm working on (thanks for that!) is so varied too:

- "I don't know what you want to say".

- "The characters' motivations are weak".

- "What script? Mnn, probably went to my spam folder" (where it belongs, he seemed to say, silently).

- "Have you ever heard about script conventions?".

- "Have you ever heard about grammar?".


Not all have been as positive, though:

- "You should be in a mental hospital".


In short, a very useful eyes-opening feedback that I will be using to get to a third-draft (and hopefully last) stage.


In the mean time, I keep struggling to finalise the DVD of "It did happen" ("Eso que pasó"), which seems to be encountering all the possible difficulties in the history of having difficulties when making DVDs.

If you don't believe DVDs are evil, ask this man.
He just spent several hours wrestling violently
with the DVD of the picture, before immobilising it
with the popular Vulcan finger pinch.

I have also been busy with drafting the storyline for the online comic book I mentioned here. In principle, the whole thing will have no dialogues, which is quite challenging. As I understand that this affects every single scene and try to find my way around explaining things in a different way, my heart -unreasonable as ever- hopes the results will eventually be good!

Thanks for reading.

Writing is rewriting

"The first draft is always shit" - Ernest Hemingway

Out of the three shortfilm scripts I had started, I decided on the one that I'm most comfortable with and seemed to provoke a better reaction in the people I told about it. By far the weirdest too. A half-absurd (and only half!) comedy with sci-fiction overtones told for both the geek and the average human being.

At this point, two aspects potentially differentiate "The Entity!!" from the average short film: the undeniable attractive of the exclamation marks in its working title (which at the same time would avoid undesirables copyright issues down the line with a similarly-titled old film) and the fact of portraying the most surprising life form in modern film history. Or maybe not.

I hadn't written a short film script in years. At least, not with the idea of actually finishing it. Taking notes and throwing words and characters onto a paper sheet (or the ever-practical cofffe shop napkins) is one thing; writing drafts, fixing what doesn't work and slowly, painfully progress through weak dialogue and blurry characters, another completely different. Writing is rewriting, they say.

In my attempt for understanding what the hell I was trying to do when I wrote the previous version of the script, and clevery moving away from the computer screen I'm spending so many hours with in any case, I decided to put my lovely wall to good use.

Since I wrote "La Sopa" ("The Soup") and "Eso que paso" ("It did happen"), through writing unfinished scripts, short stories and the occasional comic-book, I've become a freak of structure. Laying out your story bit by bit is a great way of seeing where the plot gets boring, or where the hell your characters are going (they'd better go somewhere). It also helps a lot when seeing the need of merging scenes (once you realise in horror that they both should have actually been the same scene in the first place!) or, when necessary, weeding scenes out in bitter tears.

In short, the second draft is now ready, no one got killed in the process so far and I'm enjoying tremendously. And while I leave it aside for a while I'll be starting doing some calcs for the budget.

Soon, from any sort of funding I can qualify for to the less glamorous-still-effective begging down your local grocery store, chances are that I will be trying anything and everything.

Thanks for reading.

Current projects

Although still outrageous, I do find that having quite a few projects going on at the moment makes up for my lack of posts for the last 3 weeks. Some of you already know about them, since these days I seem to indefatigably tell every living soul about them, hungry for feedback. Well, it's either that OR more general talk about films and (Saint) Google as usual. Thanks everyone for enduring it, and for the good ideas.

Coming back to the projects, for those still in the dark and wanting to know, here is a quick list:

• A DVD of Eso que pasó ("It did happen"): My latest shortfilm (filmed in 2004, right after the dinosaurs where wiped out from the face of the Earth). Finally subtitled in English, it also includes a "Making of" feature and even some never-ever-seen before secret material. It's pretty much ready by now. After some finishing touches I will only need to alleviate (or somehow mask) my current lack of knowledge on platforms such as ebay and amazon. As soon as I can solve this thorny issue, I will make it available for everyone who can't wait to have it. My mom assures me she'll get two copies, for instance (don't let me down, mom!).

• 3 shortfilm scripts: That is NOT to say that, after 5 long years of non-producing I've embarked myself in a triple project. Rather, I've been writing in an uncontrolled manner and now find myself with all this material that, I think, I'd really should do something with. I'll pick one to start with and off we go. More on this soon.

• A film script: Selling a script for a feature film is an idea that I have been recently entertaining (as opposed to producing it myself, which certainly isn't happening any time soon). Sadly, I literally have dozens of half-finished scripts (and of course mountains of notes). So actually finishing one looks like the logical next step now, process that I'm enjoying enormously, necessary pain aside. It's a sci-fiction story, more on this soon too.

• A website: After making a few in the past, none of them for me, it's about bloody time I had mine. The kind of thing you never get around too, isn't it? Well, it's happening now. I'm putting it together with my brother, it will cover both individual and common projects and it will be pretty pretty pretty.

• An online comic-book: Inspired by the sketch below, will be drawn by (again) my brother. After we get over the initial research-and-preparations stage, we'll start producing pages (or its online equivalent) on a regular basis. I'll keep you posted.

Well, there are some more projects on, but nothing in the realistic pipeline for the next few months. If you are even a little bit excited about any of this, I am already delighted. If not, well... (not even a little??) you obviously have no heart...

Tragic.

In any case, I'm terribly ashamed by the length of this post.

Peculiar x 2

A few weeks ago I had the extremely unoriginal occurrence of taking the bus on a Sunday morning. Why I write about this today (and not bloody then) can only be attributed to my failing memory and the fact that the napkin where I took some original notes on this was playfully hiding from me under a growing pile of paper, most of it useless, that sits on my desk. I usually spend the bus ride reading, except when there's entertaining people-watching to do. That morning, a couple of original occurrences awaited me, in the form of two curious men.

The first one got on the bus two stops after I did. Despite his obvious intention to disguise himself as a younger man with the cunning use of a "Primark" coat, I reckon he must have been over 40. His cheeks were of a very intense red, for some reason. I like to think that the merry tones weren't caused by ruthless drinking that early in the morning. Although come to think of it, it might have. He had this whole Don Quixote look (literally, goatee and crazy eyes). He started angrily preaching, directly to the driver, about how outrageous it was that it was Sunday, 11-ish (as if this was paramount data for his speech, uncalled for anyway) and that a "female" was driving the bus. There's no moral or social message here, I just find it so hard to believe that people like this man are still around, wandering the world and hopping on buses.

Seriously: if THIS had happened that morning,
do you think I wouldn't be telling you about it instead?
Look at the smiling woman, she is hilarious.

The second strange man got off the bus (okay, I probably missed him getting on, give me a break) when the driver pulled off to take a phone call. This one was a bit older, and his cheeks clearly weren't as red. If you are in a hurry, this may not go down well, that I understand. Although, if that's the choice, I personally prefer them to stop: sure, stop and take your call, by all means, rather driven around by someone with two hands available, thanks very much. But this man in particular seemed to suddenly burst into pure anger for just a few seconds, he then got up from his seat and off the bus (the driver had no choice but opening the doors before he'd destroy them by using his pure instant-developed rage). Then he just stayed there, giving his back to the bus, silently making his point. His wrath had turned into calmed dissatisfaction by then. I may have seen a touch of regret in his eyes when we set off again, maybe in response to the chilly whether he had come to forget about, enveloped by the comfort of the bus. Or simply to the prospect of the long wait for the next vehicle. Luckily, there was some construction work in the pavement, right where he had got off. And he soon seemed to find in closely, thoughtfully examining it the new purpose of his life.

Now you might think this is not curious at all. Maybe it wasn't that interesting and I was just looking for excuses to keep my book in my bag. In all fairness, it's quite a thick book.

Creating or trying to: Love, hate and commitment

If you struggle to become a writer or to produce any other form of minimally creative or art-like piece of work too, you have probably figured it out already: it's VERY important to learn to control the process itself before it controls you (whatever this means). Creating is a funny thing. At least it is for me, and I find it very interesting how it all comes to be... and sometimes even comes together.

It usually happens this way:

You have an idea. You love it. It is unlike anything else you've heard, seen or experienced before. You feel sky high. Yeah, it's the one, THE idea, no doubt. The one you'll finally get some serious credit for. Probably some money too. Big money. That idea you want to tell all your friends about so they can look at you in awe and tell you how incredibly creative you are. And it was so sudden, as well, you probably took quick, condensed, powerful notes on some Starbucks paper napkin. Or on toilet paper, or stolen post-it notes (anything is valid, remember you had THE idea). Hardly a few intelligible words anyway. Damn, that's just scribbling, isn't it? Will you even be able to even understand your own cryptic writing when you take on the task -and surely you can do this blindfolded- of making this idea a palpable reality? Well, never mind, you are still amazed at yourself for having such a great occurrence, the sun shines brighter than ever, and you want to dream on.

Next day. The same idea that you loved to bits just hours ago, now you absolutely hate it. Moreover, you hate yourself for even liking the idea once and thinking that you could create something worth being seen/read/whatever. How could you not realise that the idea was rubbish, or a simply impossible project? Or maybe both. Were you drunk? Maybe you were so drunk that you can't remember being drunk? Were you an idiot? Are you still??

Two things are true about this creature: it's just too weird
and it has nothing to do with the content of this article whatsoever.

You then probably decide to leave it aside for a while. Then one day you come up with something to make the story work again. Obviously, it's a great "something", the "something" that will finish with all the plot holes and undefined characters, the "something" that will finally give the story the spark that it was lacking. You are obviously happy with all this, but for how long? Will it last one, two days? The cycle repeats itself a few times through the process, threatening to leave you with yet another unfinished project.

So, as of late, I've added a next step. And I suppose this is what I wanted to say (damn, you really are a loyal reader if you are still here after all the rambling). Passion is good. Coming up with ideas, a necessary source of material. But commitment, discipline, and actual time spent in developing and making all these ideas come true, is the only way of... well... of making them come true.

Do it! One think is for sure: you will never know whether the idea was good or not if you never bloody make it happen!

Not expecting that surprising ending, were you? :-P