Idle Mist XIX: Award Show Controversy

The teacher who didn't allow us to shoot Vana Espuma as a student film (thank you, I wouldn't own the rights otherwise!) and was a pain in the ass throughout witnessed the enthusiastic response the film received in its first screenings and decided without our knowledge to enter it ...Read more

Idle Mist : Minds Awake

During editing I also added the quotes that appear at the beginning of each chapter in Vana Espuma.

Here they are, as requested...

There's a chapter title in Vana Espuma that combines Plato's parable of the cave with Shakespeare's Macbeth (here's a bit more from act V, scene V):

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying n...Read more

Idle Mist XIII: illegal Editing

When the cameras were taken away we still had a couple of scenes to go, so we rented a cheaper camera for the last couple of scenes. I figured the grittier look and the change of format could be used to bringing a bit of a consciousness to metafictional framework oo the filmmaking itself, which was, in p...Read more

Idle Mist XII : Music Out of Time

A few years before Idle Mist, I had written a couple of pieces of mu...Read more

Idle Mist XI: Confused spectators, onset nemesis, jealous gf and other trivia

My dad had a bit part in the classroom scene that I had to cut. To this day he hasn't forgiven me for it. It was in editing that I decided to make this a time-warp scene, to hint at how reality in the film was coming undone.

The breakfast scene was shot at my dad's apartment. They put up with a lot from me over there. Months before I'd brought the chamber orchestra to rehearse and record something I wrote to his living room. Fortunately, he seemed to like it but...Read more

Idle Mist X: Concert scene

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Idle Mist part IX: Walking into Harm's Way

Since we didn't have stuntmen or a special effects department, Juan, who played the Shade, the transgenic feline character, had to actually climb walls and leap from rooftops, decked out in black paint, make up and the claws he made attached to his hands. All this while holding the camer...Read more

Caché and Casino Royale: Art, pop, and the middle shelf

I recently saw Haneke's Caché which could superficially be referred to as a genre film, a thriller, but the overall tone, the treatment and the intentions behind will warrant its place on the top shelf where I keep DVDs of films by Kieslowski, Fellini, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Resnais, etc. The main preoccupation here is not "whodonit" but rather the way we deal with guilt. This is a deeply moral film about injustice, prejudice and responsibility. SPOILER::: If you look carefully, in the lon...Read more

Idle Mist: Beneath the Surface

In Idle Mist, Ciro is the author of the Vana Espuma comicbook, and that reality is intruding into his waking life. I used a different language, exploiting the power of the static comicbook image, to develop a story that wasn't exactly parallel, but rather a twisting thread that intersected and eventual...Read more

Idle Mist VIII: Lurid Tales of Intrusion and Betrayal

Originally there were three other crew members other than me involved in the Vana Espuma short, not two. But on that first of three days of shooting conflict ensued. Since we were shooting at the Bellas Artes university campus, we momentarily endured the company of one of our teachers...Read more