Trevor: He’s not a people person

An indie feature film about a man in Spain and his daughter.
Plus wine, lamb, some ants and a cat.

How many creative expats does it take to make a film in Barcelona? Answer, not that many. At least not as many as you might think. I caught up with the screenwriter Georgina Tremayne, director Carlos Domeque and lead actor Hunter Tremayne from the soon to be filmed Trevor, a low-budget, and hopefully successfully crowdfunded feature about expats, and one in particular called Trevor (as you may have guessed). Read the rest of this article…

Jordi de Temple at work

There’s something very evocative about watching the city at night from up high. Wondering what all the people below are up to. And I’m a big fan of the timelapse technique when used well. So Jordi de Temple’s video, Into the Night, is right up my street.

I’ll let Jordi explain it:

“Into the Night” is an exercise of light and colour of 4 minutes that tries to show Barcelona, its surroundings and some specific areas of Catalonia, from a different, unusual and cinematic point of view.

To achieve that, has been used the time-lapse technique, which allows to capture the time at specified intervals, frame-by-frame, using mostly, in this case, long exposure.

Part of the project has been made in the so-called blue hour, whose diffused light has some features that allow to capture spectacular sunrises or sunsets full of warm colors thanks to the position of the sun relative to the horizon. It is in these moments when the skies still have shades of color and the natural light is mixed with the artificial light of the city, thus being able to capture skies in detail and urban buildings illuminated simultaneously.

I’m always waiting for that moment when the light changes and becomes something special, a brief moment where the urban or natural landscape collides with light and composition to create beautiful images that are hidden to the naked eye.

This has been a photographic adventure of understanding the light and color of the night. An opportunity to observe the urban space and its density and to contemplate how these elements converge. An exercise of patience and perseverance throughout dozens of nights and dawns of cold carrying heavy stuff. And of course many hours of postproduction.

Read the rest of this article…

The final scene of Lapin

Mention Barcelona and lots of things come to mind, but filmmaking is probably not the first. Yet you’d be surprised how fertile a filmmaking ground this city is, and it’s not just the sunshine. The locals are very film literate and have a long list of festivals to prove it, from D’A and L’Alternativa to In Edit and Mecal. There’s even a festival dedicated entirely to film and football!

At a time when obituaries are being written for cinemas all over, Barcelona has seen several new art-house venues open. But it isn’t just film buffs that love this town — so do filmmakers. Plenty of big name directors have come through here, from Woody Allen to Alejandro Iñárritu, but we’re talking about homegrown talent, filmmakers who live and work in Barcelona.

Among them is Andrés Bartos, the writer and director of the short film Lapin, une étrange histoire d’amour. The film is a dark fable about a man who falls in love with a rabbit-like girl and discovers a strange world under his apartment. The director described it to me as “though Before Sunrise were directed by David Lynch possessed by the ghost of Chuck Jones.” Consider my curiosity piqued. I met up with Andrés Bartos to find out more about the film and get his take on what makes Barcelona a good place to shoot a movie. Read the rest of this article…

Missing the Spanish summer already? Well check out this video and relive a little of your holidays.

This is a beautiful composition of photography and moving images set to a reworked version of Spanish Caravan by The Doors performed here by Nigel Kennedy and the Prague Symphony Orchestra.

Quite lovely. Read the rest of this article…

No, me neither. So I suggest you watch this clever time-lapse video from NNtonio Rodríguez.

N O P E O P L E * BARCELONA

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