The secrets of the Alchemist, part 1

Hello Karmacritic!

While I still don't have any finished film to show up at the site, I decided to start making somekind of production bitacore right here. Yeah, Im posing Robert Rodriguez because I just readed "Rebel Without a Crew" but what the hell :) this is a good excuse to write in my blog.

Maybe I should put somethings I didn't on My Profile because I was too lazy that time. I born in Morelia, a little mexican capital betwen the road of Mexico city and Guadalajara, the 2 most important towns here. I met Marco aka Fableforge here too, we shared common interests like sci fi movies, videogames, anime, comics and all that geekie stuff. We had been good friends since then, passed trough both difficult and nice experiences, and even wen he is not living here anymore I consider him my best friend.

I studied in the local Laws and Social Sciences school, thinking of me becoming a lawyer, but I felt sick of the system once I saw it with my own eyes. Mexico is a very corrupt country, not the most corrupt in the world but wen you ask people, they're more afraid of the police than the mob itself. Lawyers, politicians and judges are alienated with crimelords against other crimelords, is something like bad guys vs bad guys, very bizarre, only in Mexico. The good thing is that you can get a cool movie plot from this :) ... sigh. Why Laws? well, Morelia doesn't offers you too much educational options, and going to Mexico city to study something else was just out my dad's budget.

But before that, just after I finished highschool I got a job in a local software development company called vermic.com, they do somekind of low budget educational games to sell in schools. I was on the artwork department, I always loved to draw and kinda good at it so it was a great first job. I was 17 at that time, so my priorities wasn't clear then and I never considered to study something a doc to my skills, like graphic design, sciences of comunication or film making. I don't consider this part of my life as a waste of time, because I earned some experience and meet very talented people here.

Anyway Vermic fired me wen I go into laws school, but wen I was on the 6th semester of my career I met a bunch of guys and old vermic partners with the intemption to start a videogame project to jump into the international industry. They wanted to do a 3d graphics game, something never done before in our country, and I was more than excited to be in.

The main problem you can get wen you go into this kind of team projects is if the rest of the gang is not sintonizing the same frecuence you do. We all started excited and entusiastic, but the project turned into a bunch of endless discussion meetings at my friends houses, getting you to nowhere. We talked a lot about if the game should be really cool and if we could earn a lot of money with it.

At the end, I was the only one giving real work to the project: a story, characters, game design... and the rest were only there just blurbing vague ideas. The videogame project died wen most of the guys saw this kind of workflow was useless but never tried to fix it (10 people started and only 3 stayed to the end), but surged a new one. With the story and the characters so long developed one guy from the team, Armando Ortiz, who actually works in the mexican television, suggested it can work for an animation movie project. We called it "Tiempos de Furia", "Age of Fury" in english. So we were only Me, Armando and his brother Roberto trying to pull this thing into the road. Roberto was doing the admin stuff.

So we tried to make a movie project and sell it to the mexican producers using the people Armando knew. The story was about a mexican bountyhunter at the times of the revolution war in the early XX century, and how he was hired to stop a plot to kill the president. The story and the characters conquered many hearts in the media, but my inexperience made me an easy blank for their natural bussines killer instincts.

We contacted a TV producer named Melina Paz, her previous works were tv shows for JETIX, she seemed a nice person the time I met here. Also we had the chance to show the project to Cinepolis, the most important exhibition company in latinamerica wich happens to have his main offices in Morelia and recently trown into some movie production projects. Many people from the USA get blown up wen they come to Mexico and go into a Cinepolis multiplex! :) Im proud to say this guys are in the top of movie exhibition arround the world.

Well...back to the main theme... things never got into place. Because I didn't have previous experience on screenwritting or directing, Melina and her team just took my 30 page story and turned it into a movie script but turned a lot of crap out of it, never asking my opinion. Isn't my ego talking, really... that script was really crappy. Lack of continuity, flat characters, lack of emotion... non of the things I pictured for the original videogame story were there. Geez! they wanted to kill a character just to go into a formula Melina used in past productions!

Also, they wanted to hire another guy to direct the movie. Again, my lack of experience was their best argument. Melina proposed Carlos Carrera, a Cannes award winner director for an animated short film called "El Heroe", to direct the movie. But the problem was that's the only animated project Carrera has done in his career, the rest of his movies are live action dramas with a very different focus of what an action/pack -anime/drama like Furia needed. He didn't looks the comic book kind of guy like Guillermo del Toro or Alfonso Cuarón (Hellboy and Harry Potter), you know what I mean?. I love "El Heroe" and I admire Carrera's work, but I think FURIA was not the kind of story for him.

If you want to start a project, be sure your partners are talking the same language you do. It's like if you were giving Pedro Almodovar the LOTR trilogy... Carrera wasn't the right guy for it, nothing else. So as Melina.

As the main author, I tried to put my word on it. I just downloaded a script from the internet and tried to adapt my original story to the format. The result wasn't too professional, but at least gave me experience about screenwritting. Melina just blowed up wen I send her a new script, she told us we were too unprofessional to be in the bussines and never heard from her again. I don't know what got her more mad: the fact I didn't liked her script, or if she felt accepting it was crappy would make her loose creative control of the project. I think this is a common error of many producers, wen they think they must have ALL the creative managment in order to preserve the administrative. Im not saying Im a fucking genius, Im really not... but if she liked my story from the beginging, why change it so hard? Control, control, control.

(A curious note: wen Rodriguez was selling El Mariachi to the big lots, Disney wanted him to change the story to texas, and the hero to learn karate from an apache master... no words. )

Besides, the guy who was managing our project inside Cinepolis got fired before we knew if he actually showed something to the executives. Fortunatelly, all the material is copyrighted to my name, but the original team finally dissasembled. I know Armando and his brother Roberto blame me for loosing this oportunity to hit in the industry. We have a good relation nowadays, but I know we can't go into a new project anymore. We have different ways to work, different perceptions of what storytelling must be.

The next thing I did was finishing laws school. Fiu, I feel kinda liberated for typing all this. Now I have the objective to produce and direct Furia myself, it's been a hard way until now and will get harder in the future, but Im open to faith and possibilities. I got tons of positive feedback about the story and the characters from inside and outside the media, that I really think I can come in to the battle again.

Today, 2 years later, I started my own bussines called ESPEKTRO. My dream is to upgrade from a simple graphic design bussines to a multimedia production company, and I need to finish some projects to do it. One of them, is a short animated film called THE INVENTION OF THE HOMUNCULUS.

The plot: An old alchemist is trying to create artificial life, an homunculus, to be the ultimate wizard of all times. But his obsession for the project has made him forget about Ozymandias, his pet cat, who's always starving because his master never feeds him. The alchemist is about to reach his goal, and not even the loud mews of his cat will trow him appart of it, but this little problem will get him ENOURMOUS consequences to deal with in the near future.

Im assembling a group of 4 animators in order to produce this short, and we're aplying into a goverment coinvertion program to get the resources for whole year. If everything goes well, we can get about 15 000 dollars to produce HOMUNCULUS. This is a great chance to learn more about directing and producing animation, and most important of all, gaining a name inside this ungratefull bussines.

I'll try to blog all the important points surging during this process. Maybe we can't get into the coinvertion program, but i'll try to solve the problems as creative as possible. That's the fucking job of a producer anyway, solve big problems with creativity, not just trying to blast off other guy's creativity.

So... the secrets of the alchemist are about to be revealed. Stay tuned!