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(pag 74)
“I was in an anxious state, trying to think of
ideas for a feature film. The video-diary of a woman
who commits suicide and donates her organs. Three random
people receive her organs: eyes, liver, heart. How their
lives develop after the transplant.”(Dionisio
Perez, director and screenwriter)
El regalo de Silvia is Dionisio Pérez’
debut feature. He goes at it doubtless, regardless,
with Alfonso Parra backing the project as cinematographer.
The career of this author started to take off in 1995
after the success of his short film Pecados Capitales,
which received awards at the Brussels Film Festival
amongst others. Eventually, Ricardo Franco’s last
film Lágrimas Negras, was based on his script,
La sirena más turbadora,
The film features a group of young actors such as Bárbara
Goenaga, Víctor Clavijo and Adriana Dominguez,
led by Luis Tosar. Its an original film as much in the
technical aspect (it was shot on HD), as in its narrative,
structured by the video-diary of a suicidal teenager
whose organs are received by three people she has never
met.
From the outset, Alfonso Parra – cinematographer
– saw different lights for each one of the four
stories. “Both from a narrative point of view
and in terms of art direction the work was complex.
The challenge was to give every character a distinctive
photographic personality but with some unifying element”
Sce. 1 Int/Day Silvia. Vídeo-Diary
Vídeo. texture
A video camera is turned on. The frame shows a teenager’s
room, with the usual posters and gadgets. A young girl
sits calmly in front of the camera, and she calmly starts
speaking as she looks into the camera: “Today
I’m happy…I’m going to commit suicide”
This is the only sequence Alfonso Parra didn’t
shoot with the Sony HDW-F900: “it’s a special
kind of story so I wanted to distinguish it from the
rest. After several tests with DVCAM’s and Betacam
Digital, I chose the Betacam SP. Using HD for those
sequences would have been out of context. Moreover the
digital transfer of the analogue format shot with Arrilaser
gives a degraded texture which evokes a home video,
giving it more credibility”.
The life of the rest of characters was shot in HD. Carlos(played
by Luis Tosar) is a humble worker who tries to take
care of his family after a heart transplant. “He
is unable to escape his daily routine
(pag 75)
as well as being caught up in his own personal contradictions.
I tried to compose his character through the use of
light and repetitive photography” Parra explains,
who also used framing to create a contrast with the
other stories.
For Inés’ (Adriana Dominguez) character,
a young woman who discovers the world when she recovers
her sight thanks to a cornea transplant. Alfonso played
with light and shadow “but always maintaining
a luminous feel, it wasn’t about having a lot
of light. To get as much latitude as possible I had
to modify the whole camera set-up, and we achieved 4
extra points of aperture under and over”. Mateo
(played by Víctor Clavijo) is the thug who receives
a new liver. “Mateo, due to his violent character,
needed a different mise-en-scene, more dynamic, with
space in the frame and wide-angle lenses that accentuated
perspective” explains Alfonso. To find the unifying
photographic element between the four stories “I
chose to repeat certain frames and lighting patterns
with each of the characters, in different circumstances
and places, in different sequences with similar moods;
when Mateo is at a gas station, Carlos in a factory
and Inés in a market I used the same light, with
shock lights, which give a purple tone. This strategy
gave the narrative and the lighting pattern the necessary
coherence”
An actor’s film
When shooting on HD a very special relationship is established
between the cinematographer and the make-up team. In
close shots the camera becomes a very subtle, precise
tool. Sometimes, its definition can be a problem if
you don’t take the necessary measures. This was
the case with El Regalo de Silvia, a film with lots
of close shots, where the actors and their gaze is a
vital element. “Its very hard to achieve a skin
tone that doesn’t look plastic. The communication
with make-up people is essential. For skin tone reproduction
I have started off from the ITU 709 standard and then
modified the camera matrix. I also used Calcolor filters
and in the end the results were good.”
For Alfonso Parra, the differences between this film
and El hombre araña contra el mundo, in which
he was also the HD cinematographer, are huge. "El
hombre araña…had a comic-book look, with
a surreal element, dominated by shadows and flat colours.
We had a lot of wide shots, and although the camera
and the lenses were the same than in El Regalo de Silvia,
the way we approached the characters was different.”
This film is a Spanish-Chilean-Portuguese co-production,
with the intervention of Lorelei Producciones (Galicia),
TVG, El Medano Producciones (Madrid), Imval (Bilbao),
Bausam Film (Barcelona), Calatambo Producciones (Chile),
Cinemate (Portugal) and Ignacio Benedeti (A Coruña)
Its budget was of 1.200.000 euros (200 million pesetas),
and it had the support of IBERMEDIA, del ICAA, and it
has been bought for broadcast by ETB, TV3 y Canal9. |
