CHRISTMAS COVID 2020, in SadColor!

For me, the differential performances of an emulsion, in its grain structure,  the type of black and white or rendition of colour, is very important when  filming one of my cinematographic opus. In my opinion, there is not a bad emulsion: just you have to find just the one for which its texture can give more strength to the message than you tell  as filmmaker! 

This Christmas season have been the saddest that me has ever lived: many have been those who have died during 2020 and, also, those who have been ruined or lost their jobs because of COVID. A sad Christmas with masks but without family reunions, a sad Christmas without dinners with friends and colleagues, a sad Christmas without travels, a sad Christmas without money.

To reflect this sad situation, what better film to shoot than reversal AGFA's Aviphot motion picture film, which, with its sad colours and coarse grain, is the ideal film to accompany images (that would not be the same without the sad version of popular carols by talented pianist Tom Mucenieks). 

The first class processing was made by Riccardo Pascucci, a laboratory technician who, possessing arcane secrets of the photochemical world, knows how to extract the impossible from each emulsion, even strongly outdated ones, using ingredients to which he only has access thanks to his privileged access to the Vatican.

The film editing was done together with my regular collaborator, and friend,  Alex López, as well as the refilling of the emulsion in Single-8 cartridges. This type of cartridge is vital for me as it allows me to shoot the film with my favorite camera, the Fujica ZC1000. In this case, at 24 f.p.s., with two lenses: the Fujinon EBC 7.5 - 75 mm and the Fujinon EBC 5.5 mm, with all the shots (many of them handheld, without a tripod) opening always at f 1.8!!! As Aviphot is a poliester based film, it was possible to load every cartridge with 14 meters! When the opus was finished, the film scan for Vimeo was done by Pablo Gómez, and Alex did some postproduction works in the file before to upload it to Vimeo.

As even despite the coronavirus that strikes Civilization, one can not stop creating with film, today,  here is!, the premiere of Christmas Covid 2020.