Swampland Studios

Recording, editing, sound designing & pre-mixing in Swampland Studios for Jorge Molina Cuquerella´s PRKNG, starring Pablo Turégano. There was some music I composed for the film, but unfortunately there wasn´t enough time to finish the score, so some bits from Petra Flurr´s “Visage” (Warsaw was raw records, 2008) were used instead of them.

Working with Jorge Molina Cuquerella is always something special, we met more than 10 years ago and we´ve been sharing thoughts about films, theater plays, sound and music since the very first moment we met, so he was good friend of mine before even thinking about working together.

I feel some kind of telepathy with him sometimes, and he always lets me (or “us”, the more or less regular people in the crew) know about his projects from the first lines he writes, what helps a lot in the production process, so we can row in the same direction months before shooting anything, there are some remarkably funny brainstorming moments I can´t tell you right now…

The filming of this one was an absolute nightmare, three nights inside of a parking lot, breathing the worst air possible, sleepless (working in the day time in another project for Warsaw Was Raw records), awful acoustics with infinite reverb, poor equipment, moving light systems and a lot of other people in the set, so it was hard to keep that enviroment quiet, I can tell you.

The editing process was quite hard also, too many problems with computers, formats (we had to record all the sound straight to the camera, “the red one”) and lots of things to overdub, but considering the situation I´m more or less satisfied about the result, even if I was looking for some kind of “Eraserhead” ambience and my main point and motivation was making just the music.

I really missed Marcel in this one…I want to thank the sound assistant Pablo Thonon his good disposition and patience.

Probably this won´t be the final version:

PRKNG HD from jorge antonio on Vimeo.

Sound edition for Dany Campos´s “El Canto del Grillo” ( Eiga & 14 pies, 2005).

Probably one of the best experiencies I ever had working with sound. The first reason is working with (and under the supervision of) Manuel Gama (from “Taller de ruidos”, where all the sound work was done), my teacher, one of the most skilled sound technicians I ever met, and my friend.

The second reason is the great acceptance this short film had, being showed in more than 200 festivals in 45 countries and winning international prizes such as the Angry Film Festival (Melbourne, Australia), the Platinnum Remi Award from Houston festival (USA), Kawasaki´s film festival (Japón), Swäbisch Hall (Germany), Wrocklaw (Polonia) and the jury´s special mention in the Pedrera de Montevideo festival (Uruguay).

The third one is we had enough time to do what we had in our mind, even if it was a difficult short film to edit: quite a long story to tell, extreme ambience swings, industrial sounds, cars, trains, gunshots, etc (even faking a vomit).

And fourth one, the fact of having 4 Neumann U67 in my hands for a month.

Any kind of feedback would be much appreciated.

First part;

Second part:

Recording, editing and mixing sound for Zoe Berriatúa´s “Epílogo”, with Macarena Gómez and Pablo Turégano. (Producciones invisibles, 2008).

This one was recorded in Swampland using an Audio Technica AT3060, Motu 828 mkII and a primitive G4.

As every internet video, the quality isn´t as good as it should be. There was an english version of the film I can´t locate right now.

Any kind of feedback would be much appreciated.

Epilogo from Zoe Berriatúa on Vimeo.

La CripTa & De Profundis were two collectives created out of friendship, that were born and grew up fed with passion and love for a certain kind of music.

We were a bunch of people with no experience (or in the best case, almost nothing) in the show bussiness, moved by the need of doing something about the sounds that made our hair stand up and dance and scream; the musical scene in our city was absolutely dead, so someone said “what the fuck?”.

So we just put 50 € each (or was it 100 €?) for promoting a gig in a very small venue, we contacted two bands (Quidam from Barcelona & Deadchovsky from Paris), printed some posters and flyers and took them to the record stores, sent some stuff to the newspapers and run a website, that was the 3rd of September 2005, and we were very very scared.

Two years after that night, we were running a dj session every weekend (we were spinning ourselves, we had NO CLUE how to do it, technically speaking), saving the money for the gigs; Around 30 bands from Poland, Germany, USA, France, UK, etc. had already played in our shows, from small venues (like the first one) to some big ones. And I think we did the whole thing without any aspiration about money, success, recognition or pride…that wasn´t the birth of a massive company or a money-making machine, of course. It was kind of inspiring for us, that was our dream and nobody else´s.

I don´t know…The point is I was watching some clips in youtube from shows we promoted and I found the last one (the last one I was involved, I mean) before being kicked out of the club, because of a massive fine the owner had to pay.

I felt weird when I watched it and…now that I´m thinking about moving somewhere else (well, I´ve been thinking about it for two years) I should be thankful to all the guys that made that thing possible, probably I won´t have the chance to see in a long time, so this post is for all of you without distinction, to everyone that believed in the project those two years.

There I was, on the left, happy to leave the mixing desk, that was the first time I saw that particular model in my life and the whole situation was quite stressful.