Carmela, a life of freedom

These are the goals for this 6th week! Last week we completed for the first time all of our goals! Let's see how this week goes...

1. Keep polishing the Pitch deck, mainly the missing sections:

   1. 90 seconds teaser script

   2. Director’s statement

   3. Look book

   4. Story beats

2. Keep working on the timeline

3. Start the outline of the teaser video structure using the timeline

4. Deliver to our THU guide the Social Media materials they asked

Let's go!

#SonyTalentLeaguebyTHU #Carmelaalifeoffreedom #Carmelaunavidalibre

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carmelaunavidalibre/?hl=es

This week’s highlight was meeting Shiho for the first time. We felt like we connected really fast with her because of our personal experiences, but also with her art because, just like our project, it’s very connected to nature but also new technologies.

And we are so happy to have also her on our mentor’s group.

As we said, this past week was the most intense one. We had 5 STL official meetings with Susana Piegas, David Prescott, Scot Stafford, Shiho Fukuhara and the Tribe Advisors…

But since we are the most over optimistic and reckless team ever… we thought we could save some more time for 3 MORE extra meetings with Kris Pearn and 2 experts from outside STL.

On wednesday, after Scot’s session, we had a meeting with the amazing documentary maker and journalist Adrián San Román. He helped us with the two structures we were working on until that moment and gave us some precious advice like:

-Do not cling too much to the classic chronological narration style.

-Think of a good cold open that states a clear unknown from the beginning of the film
-And finally, have a shorter introduction (because in our structures the intro parts were a bit too long).
But Adrián also gave us a big “Ahá” moment where we rescued an idea we discarded back in 2019: the roadmovie unifying thread. That gave us the continuity we needed in the structure.

On thursday we asked Kris Pearn to do an extra mentorship with us and he kindly accepted. We discussed the new ideas we had for the structure after Adrián’s meeting and he really helped us put in order all our thoughts. He said we should start editing the timeline as soon as possible to be able to see what was the material we really had and we all realized that the main structuring work would be done in the editing phase. So that’s enough structure for now, guys! We will follow Kris’s advice and get back to our original ideas and what we wanted to convey: freedom, freedom and freedom. It’s a documentary about freedom.

Lastly, on friday we had a super interesting meeting with our Mom’s neurologist, Dr. José Manuel Aldrey Vázquez. He gave us a masterclass in PCA’s symptoms and helped us tremendously in understanding how people with PCA see things (which, believe us, it’s reaaally difficult).  We will not get in details (you’ll have to see our film if you are curious!), but in summary he explained very technical and scientific stuff, he helped us with the contradiction that David pointed in his meeting (we were simply not understanding how the symptoms work together and we are now going to delete some of the VFX we had been planning, but add others in exchange). And he even gave some ideas to how we could depict some things on screen. We learned a lot and it was amazing!

PS: If you ever participate in Sony Talent League and try to balance it with a full time job... DO NOT schedule that much meetings in a single week. Just don't do it.

What an incredible and intense week we had! It’s been the most intense one ever since STL started, no doubt about it. We worked on VFX, music, structure, general tone and pitch… All that in just five days!

We started off with David’s Prescott’s meeting where we showed him our progress with the VFX plan. After researching in depth scientific information about PCA’s symptoms we started imagining how those scenes would look like in the documentary. And we did what he suggested in his first mentorship: we drew those ideas! As you can see, they are very rough sketches, but still useful. He also pointed out that two of the ideas that we had to depict the symptoms were contradictory between them. We don’t want to make any spoilers…but if you read our following post you’ll see the solution we found to that contradiction! ;)

Next was Scott Stafford’s first mentorship. We showed him all the references and ideas we had for the music and sound and he gave us some very good advice to keep working on that:

-We were planning on using a Waterphone for the psychiatric parts, but he suggested it was better to substitute it with metalophones, since the Waterphone is a bit too cliché and could give the wrong impression to the audience.

-He also gave us a very useful homework: to do a Spotify list to start adding the songs we liked for reference or maybe even to use them in the documentary after getting the rights.

-He told us the best way to comunicate with the composers is to give them information about the emotions rather than the instruments or musical styles. We could even do an emotion script and that would be the most useful document for our composers.

-And finally he told us that one of the most important moments in the music production for a film comes when the full edit is done, even if the VFX and color grading are not yet finished, and directors see the whole movie without music or sound and explain to the composers how do they imagine the music for each scene.

Last, but not least, we had our first meeting with our new mentor: Shiho Fukuhara, calling from Japan. It was very important for us to meet her at that time of the week because we needed some fresh eyes to look at our project, knowing very little about it beforehand. Note this, it’s important! Look for fresh eyes to test your project from time to time. She also gave us a very good advice: to focus on emotions rather than facts in the structure. If we focus on emotions, she said, the audience will feel engaged but if we focus on the facts the audience will just feel sorry. And that’s definitely not what we want.

PAULA:

Believe it or not but I have spent the last 2 years without almost completely listening to music. I used to listen to music all the time, while I was driving, studying, cleaning… But it suddenly stopped when our mother died. I didn’t want to listen to music at all. Occasionally I did but it felt like forcing myself to eat something I really disliked. Grief can be really weird, I guess…

The good news is that ever since I arrived to Paris and more specifically since I started working on the project again for STL I have started to enjoy music again little by little and it has been a very touching experience.

I don’t have a particular style inspiring me right now, I’m just rediscovering music in general. What I can tell you is I’ve always had a very wide musical taste.

Trip hop is a genre I used to enjoy a lot in the last years. I used to listen to it a lot while doing my PhD (I liked bands like Morcheeba, Hooverphonic, Massive Attack…). Rock music, heavy metal (and many of its subgenres) and punk have always had a place in my heart since I was a teenager (I love very different styles and bands, from Sum 41 to Dream Theater, or Children of Bodom to Bruce Springsteen, just to name only a few and to illustrate their differences). But I also used to listen to all kinds of pop music, jazz, blues, folk music from around the world, disco, funk, bossa nova, reaggae, classical music, film soundtracks (this is the best of all times!) and even some rap and hip hop sometimes. 

I tried to learn how to play the piano, the electric guitar and the harmonica… but I failed. I don’t have enough patience for doing music unfortunately. I think my favourite instrument is the blues harmonica.

Some little random and also very different recommendations I love and you reading this might not know:
Le Trio Joubran (Palestine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoiyWTtinbk
Antía Muíño (Galiza): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIX6Ayb8ELc
Rasha (Sudan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOdcgc9ot3k&list=PL0-RIuqz2pQFZFy_EXKXgDHaa1DWKdyjj&index=5
Carmen Consoli (Italy): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuJjOzGIsv0
Carlos Nuñez (Galiza): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia5Hfp2_EK8
Mariya Takeuchi (Japan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gj47G2e1Jc
Ayax y Prok (Spain): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCe7VFfrh6E

CLARA:

I loooove music, I listen to music all the time: while driving, while drawing, while cooking... I've never had a particular music style that I like above all others. I know I love dancing as well, so any dancy-i sort of song is gonna make its way into my Spotify playlists, but to be honest, a whole different range of other songs make it as well.

If you've been following the project diaries, you'll know that I work in many different things ( I'm an actor, but I work at a cinema as a front of house part time, but I'm also illustrating a children's book... ) So wherever I'm learning lines or filming a selftape I'm not listening to music, but I sure am when I'm preparing to act. I follow some very weird looking exercises (at least to the untrained eye), to warm up my body and voice and I use very different music in every stage of the process (calmer songs at the start and then some real movers and shakers towards the end). When I'm drawing, I listen to pretty much the same music that I listen to when I'm driving, which is a very eclectic mix of pretty much everything.

I was talking to my sister about it the other day, and I think we owe our really broad musical taste to our parents, specially to our mum, who loved music, but not just one style in particular.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here goes a little taste of some of my favourite songs/styles:

I use this playlist whenever I'm working with words, because it's instrumental, so it helps with not getting distracted by the lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qap5aO4i9A 

This one is one of those that I have to sing at the top of my lungs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmxSxKxBbQE 

Same as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsFnf__JUOw 

Some of them are just GOOD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtJzr1Wcy_s 

And these are some of the classics that show up on all of my playlists:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_EVU84Cpx8 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Ae-LhMIG0 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlow3LFMdT4 
https://youtu.be/4qAzO8FbHn4 
https://youtu.be/wDjeBNv6ip0 
https://youtu.be/iWOyfLBYtuU 
https://youtu.be/2q9_ZEtuTR8 
https://youtu.be/vw9pIQCMQfM 

Some funkier ones...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHVKb2j6rfc 
www.youtube.com/watch?v=01CM8jHzQpI 

Some weird ones: 
https://youtu.be/bHMYMvgNAZE 

And finally, a bit of music that's directly related to me. This was one of the happiest periods in my life, when I used to busk as a day job in Madrid: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUCI4pfq8ZM 

All in all, I'm a huge fan of good music, so here's a little bit of an insight... Hope you enjoyed it!

These are the goals for this 5th week! We can't believe it's been already a month!

In this order:

1. Do the second structure
2. Fill the Pitch deck
3. Research symptoms
4. Plan the VFX: drawings based on the structure for David’s mentorship
5. Start working on the structure video timeline If we have the time:
6. Polish Scott’s music bible
7. Continuity of the thread
8. Quickly polish the details of the structures / write it
9. Start working on a storyboard

Let's go!

SonyTalentLeaguebyTHU
#Carmelaalifeoffreedom
Carmelaunavidalibre
Instagram: @carmelaunavidalibre

Hey! If you saw the video of Paula's Workspace you already know she was impatiently waiting for her PC to arrive from Spain to Paris, in order to be able to work better. Well, good news! It arrived safe and sound and now we can work on Carmela's project more easily! Yay! :D

This week we accomplished something amazing and very necessary to get all the rest of the process done: we finnished a structure! It’s not a definitive one, but at least it’s the first full one.

Kris’s mentorship on Tuesday was filled with the usual and wonderful “aha moments”, as Susana Piegas likes to call them. Clara couldn’t attend but she was still oddly present because Paula and Kris talked a lot about her. They discussed their different points of view and other possible versions of the structure combining the sister’s and the mum's point of view.

He also gave us some good tips we think you might get some use out of: 

You have to prove if the thread of your story/structure/script holds.
Find a person who doesn’t know a thing about it and see if they get it.
If they are confused, be aware! It means you should clarify your story.
And finally, whatever choice you make in the writing, make sure it’s an emotional one.

Our homework for Kris is to translate the structure into an edited timeline to allow us to see the material we have; and to do a new structure with some of the points Paula and him discussed during the session.

Vani’s session was a wake-up call for us because we were so focused on the structure and the details that we almost had forgotten about our goal for the end of STL and the mentorships, which is to have a pitch deck and a teaser to search for funding and producers. So thank you Vani for being our lighthouse. We tend to get a bit lost in the forest and forget our long term objectives sometimes… 

Our homework for Vani is to start filling the pitch deck. It doesn’t need to be perfect or beautiful, we just need to start writing it down to be able to edit it later. 

And of course… start working on that teaser!

The highlight of the week, and a beautiful present in the shape of a quote from Kris Pearn is this:

"There are no good ideas or bad ideas. There is only ideas that are right for now and some that might be right later on"

...make with this what you will. For us, it's been a huge relief!

Well, well, well... Taking into account that Clara flew to Mexico and Paula had a crazy week at work traveling also (to Belgium), it seems like we were a bit too optimistic with our goals for week 3. So we are still dragging some old known goals but we will try to be more realistic and keep the list shorter for this week. Here it goes:

1. Finish the structure of the script
2. Choose the tone of the documentary
3. Look for visual stylistic references
4. Research in-depth info about Prosopagnosia
5. Schedule a meeting with Dr. Aldrey
6. Check with Chrisna to see how the music is going
7. Week end > research the symptoms and schedule the meeting with Aldrey!

Where to start with all the information our brains have been absorbing for the past 2 weeks? The mentorships were no more about “general theory” and tips but completely focused on our project and current needs. However, we think sharing our process may actually be useful for someone out there who's also working on a personal project, so let’s see if we can summarize it for you. 

What's really cool about this program and the mentors we have is that we're focusing on very specific things with each one of them, which allows us to move forward without losing sight of any front, as we probably would if we were alone.

In our meeting with Vani, we talked about the importance of setting up the tone and style of the documentary and also remembered that we should always take into account the audience and what we want them to feel / to convey. Our homework after this mentorship was for both of us to individually write the character profile of the other one (since we decided the POV of the documentary would be the sister’s POV) and reading about color scripts and different documentary types: cinema vérité, expository, participatory, reflexive, impressionistic, experimental, poetic…

With Kris Pearn, we started looking at the script like we had never before. He started talking about the film using this metaphor where we were in a cab in NY and we had to build the map of the city (the structure of the film), so every turn and every corner would be the emotions of the film, which is the most important part. He said to ask ourselves: what emotion am I following until the next turn (a shift in the script)?
He gave us a million ideas on how to tell the story, which was very freeing in the way that we can make of it anything that we want (it's also terrifying...) It helped a lot to keep listening to him going on about the "versions" of the documentary that he was imagining (he'd keep repeating things like: "there's a version where...")

Last but not least, we had the first meeting with David Prescott, which we were extremely excited about. We talked a lot about how we view the different symptoms that we want to depict with VFX and how to try and find the way to give it cohesion with the rest of the film. He gave us a couple of amazing ideas that we need to explore, like starting to make the VFX more and more confusing or disturbing as the time goes by, to depict the worsening of the symptoms.
He also gave us a great tip: DRAW how we picture the individual scenes and think with images.

As you see, it's been a pretty crazy first couple of weeks. We can't wait to keep going and let you know how it goes!

PS: Fun fact, this week had an additional difficulty, which was that Clara was in Mexico, so working with a 7 hour time difference was something else...

On thursday we finally got to start talking about what keeps Paula the most excited... VFX! And we started talking about the VFX of our own project. An we started talking about the VFX of our own project with David Prescott. However, of course, excitement without critical thought and hard work is not enough to build a project, sooo we started working on our homework for the next David Prescott's mentorship: trying to draw what we want in each scene. How do we imagine it, even if it's just doodles understandable only to ourselves. So there you can see our first doodles...

We are very different and at the same time we complement each other very well when we work as a team, but... do you want to know when it all really started? Once upon a time...

Today we want to share here with you the video we did to quickly present the project in our social media platforms (mainly Instagram, Facebook and Youtube). We did it during the holidays to ask our friends and followers to vote for the project and...it worked! Fun fact: the first version that Clara uploaded to her personal Instagram got over 30k visualizations! 

Still not following us on Instagram? Say no more, here you have all the links so that you don't miss a thing. And don't worry, we always try to post everything in English, Spanish, French and Galician. So chances are you will understand it!

The project:
Carmela, a life of freedom

Us:
Paula Bonaval
Clara Vior

Lots of work to do this week! Here is our goals list!

-Finish deciding on the prototype (yep, we’re still draguing this one)
-Prepare David’s First Mentorship
-Think about a “cohesion” element for the VFX and the rest of the film
-Prepare a document with more references for the VFX
-Research in-depth information about ONE PCA's symptom
-Check with Dr. Aldrey if the info is ok
-Keep working on the script structure until we find THE structure
-Start writing a new version of the script (?)
-Polish our music/sound design
-Start working on the Visual and Sound Pitch Bible (yep, this one too)

LET'S GO!

One of the best moments of this past week at STL happened during the weekend. It was a funny and exciting "Eureka!" moment where all advices Kris Pearn gave us in his first mentorship and all the work we had been doing on the script structure finally came to fruition. Thank you, Kris!

We know, we know. That screenshot looks chaotic. But trust us, there's some order in it and we may have found the ultimate structure! At least for now... 

Finish deciding on the prototype
Find a solution to get the physical photos from Spain
Get the physical photos from Spain (?)
Scan and check old photos, docs and digital photos and docs (?)
Research PCA's symptoms
Schedule a meeting with Dr. Aldrey to make sure the info is ok

Share script with Kris Pearn and work on it with him on Thursday

• Revise script beforehand and prepare questions

Decide on what music/sound design we want
Meet with Chrisna on Tuesday

Ask Vani to send us the Documentary Pitch bible Example
Start working on the Pitch Bible (Visual and Sound)

Start answering Mentor’s Kick-off Meeting questions

1. Kick off revise
2. Musica
3. Script
4. PCA Aldrey
5. Photos Spain
7. Start working on bible
8. Start answering mentors questions

And here is Paula's workspace! A small but cozy Parisian apartment on the sixth floor without an elevator... 

Welcome to Clara's London workspace! Plants, messiness and lot's of art are awaiting...

This week’s coolest moments were without a doubt, the Kick Off pitch and the Tribe pitch, and hearing everyone express how touched or connected they felt to our project.

A lot of people shared very personal and unique stories that relate to ours in one way or the other, and we think that’s the beauty of our project.

Thank you all so much.

Well, now that you’ve read all the theory… Want a little insight on how we dealt with it personally?

We’ll be honest. It wasn’t easy. It’s never easy to agree 100% with someone that you’re working with, even more so when you’re working with someone as close to you as your sister, and even more so when you’re working on such a personal and intense project.

We had a little bit of a meltdown on Tuesday, and all due to answering the list of questions that we had collected from Vani and David. To be more specific, we LOST IT when we had to answer the question “What do you want your audience to take away from your film?”. To have to answer that question in a way that both of us were happy with and satisfied, took us more time than answering all the others…

BUT we pushed on and got out of the hole together!

… and realized the whole thing happened because we thought we wanted different things from the project/we wanted to tell different things, when, in the end, it turned out to be that we wanted the same things all along, but have very different ways of expressing them and ourselves!

So HUGE THANKS to Vani and David for making us question what we know and what we want. It was tough, but it DEFINITELY worked.

We built a pitch that we were really proud of for the kick off meeting, and it was SO much WORTH IT!

We got amazing feedback from the Mentors and the Tribe. Here are some of their thoughts:

MENTORS:

• Loved that we had a deep understanding of what we want; that we want a teaser and a poster by the end of STL, which are feasible goals.

• Be open to feedback and changes.

• Think about the LENGTH of the documentary, see if it’s feasible to apply to which festivals with the length that we want. Maybe start with something shorter?

• Who is the audience that we are targeting it to?

• Include our point of view; we need to be able to relate to the sisters

• Share and work on the script

• Is it Carmela’s story or our version of her story?

• Be careful with the VFX, do it in a way that won’t distract from the story/won’t collide with the documentary style

• Sound/music is HALF of the film, it won’t work if it’s just people talking. Include it as part of the bible

• What is the visual style going to be? Get more specific with this

• A title that doesn’t reference just her?

TRIBE: Jesús, Aishwarya, Filipe and Inês gave us GREAT references that we need to check out and sound amazing (video games, comics, films…). Dilruba gave us a very interesting question to think about: “What was freedom for Carmela, even the most mundane things?”; Cephas brought back a point that we had heard on our kick off about the point of view of the film; and Shelley sent us some good feedback after the meeting (an example of a VFX that we could use and the idea that maybe the way to go is public/philanthropic funding rather than private).

THANKS SO MUCH FOR THIS WEEK!! ON TO THE NEXT ONE!

Week 1 GOALS:

-Finish schedule
-Decide on prototype
-Clarify what we REALLY want with the mentor’s help
Kick off pitch (15 min)
-THU tribe pitch (10 min)

Let's go!

After a loooong and insightful videocall, these are some of our initial thoughts on the project and the Sony Talent League right before the first week starts. We cannot wait for the kick-off meeting with our mentors and the Tribe! And we may share with you other pieces of the videocall... We'l see! :)