Credits:
Client: Miami Short Film Festival
Title: Beside Table
Advertising Agency: Conill
Chief Creative Officer: Pablo Buffagni
Director: Pablo Buffagni & Francisco Pugliese
Post-Production Company: Upstairs
Online: Upstairs
Color Correction – Rudel Reyes - Upstairs
Animation: Upstairs
Music Design & Audio Post: Uptempo.

“The concept is that the country is always under construction, and we Mexicans go on working to that end,” said Executive Producer Alfredo Couturier of La Fábrica Films in Mexico City. “It’s the first thing the public will see when going to the exhibition,” according to Joe Solís, who directed the production of the presentation. “What we want is for the spectator to identify with Mexico’s history, a history that is shared, whether we like it or not, with what the country is today and what we continue writing with every passing day. That’s why our images are so evocative and playful, aiming to stir an emotion and empathy among the public. And to prepare the public for what will be encountered next: an impressive art show”.

“They converted three impressive halls of the National Palace, into what they have called the “Gallery of The National Palace”. “It began as a temporary way to celebrate the Bicentennial, and now it will have a permanent presence in the National Palace, and it houses to have one of the largest collections of artifacts and art objects,” asserts Wally Rodríguez, the founder and Director of Special Effects for Upstairs, from his office in Miami.

Since it was a national landmark, the structure of the theater inside the Palace could not be altered, so they built a 100-seat theater-within-a-theater, in which  we are surrounded by 360 degrees of images including the ceiling. “To cover this huge area we used 14 projectors,” recalls Solís. It is a cinematic and animated work that was a major challenge to produce”.

Upstairs started work on the project three months before getting official approval, because if they waited they would not have made the deadline for the live event. “We had to make a substantial investment on our part, and we took our chances,” says Wally. “We believed in the project, and we have a very important tie with Mexico.  We have many Mexican clients, I was born in Mexico, and we also have a close relationship with La Fábrica, which is one of our biggest clients.”

For Anabella Sosa, a co-founder of Upstairs and its Director of Creative Services, this is one of the most important and most complex projects the firm has handled. “This contract represents a great deal for us, because a large number of companies competed for it and we won it.”

Upstairs has a team of 12 people assigned to the project, including designers, artists, animators, and producers. “They created a system to simulate and preview everything, and to make certain that the scale of what they were producing would work out when it was scaled up to those dimensions. This way the project could be visualized without the need to build a scale model, which is what is generally done in these cases, The pre-visualization allowed the artists to make sure everything would fit in place with what was being projected,” explains Sosa. “We have proprietary tools that we used to create a three-dimensional space that we could view in context, while the show was playing in real time,” clarifies Rodríguez.

“The spectacular thing about this,” remarks Anabella, “is that Upstairs, Wally, and Joe Solís succeeded in producing an interactive and plastic model that represented the project before it was filmed. The project was done twice. For the artists, that’s extremely complex.” 

For Germán Verdi, Director of the Design and Moving Graphics Department at Upstairs, the great challenge was in principle to understand the project in its entirety, “because the format was so enormous that the logical stages of production for an audiovisual presentation were overwhelmed in every way; that turned the project into a true professional challenge that very few designers in the industry have had the privilege of confronting.” Communication was the key element, affirms Verdi, who considers it a true success in the experimental field because “the unique characteristics of this presentation made the sequential procedure of design, filming, and post-production that we in this industry are accustomed to impossible.”

In addition, adds Sosa, this project’s complexity lies in the fact that it had a deadline, it was a live event, “and everything had to turn out perfectly on that day.”

They had to integrate what was filmed in Mexico with the pre-designed components, such as the 3-D animated eagle built at Upstairs, that opens the show flapping its wings. “For example, there’s a shot where you’re looking at the sky, and then suddenly the entire video turns over and you end up under water. In addition to having projection, the theater has robotic lights and, when the box rotates, rays of light follow so that you feel you’re in that space and the sun’s rays are coming through the water.” All those components had to be previewed to see how the viewer would experience them. Madrix software and the Medialon equipment, which synchronizes sound, projection, and lights at concerts, were the ones chosen for the live installation, which uses several projectors for each screen. The soundtrack and sound effects were recorded live in Mexico with human voices, to give the performance an organic and striking emphasis.

“It was a very plastic process, a completely malleable one; every time there was a change, there was a chain reaction that affected everything. It’s been one of the most complex and interesting projects we’ve done,” asserts Rodríguez. And Solís reiterates: “Wally and I have worked together on a lot of projects, but this one has without question been a huge technical and creative challenge for both of us.”

Credits:

Client: Palacio Nacional Mexican Government
Post-Production Company: Upstairs
Director of Special Effects: Wally Rodriguez
Director of Creative Services: Anabella Sosa
Art Direction: Upstairs
Animation: Upstairs
Executive Productor: Florencia Zoccola
Special Effects Artist: Rudel Reyes
Production House: La Fabrica Films
Director: Joe Solis