Onboard Diary

Headcam

In some of our live streaming broadcasts during the shooting, someone had the brilliant idea (maybe it was me) of putting a webcam on my head to broadcast from there.

The director's view

After some hours editing, finding things like this makes you smile :P

Shit happens

Shit Happens. This expression perfectly explains what happened to us.

More than one year ago, we met a Latvian producer living in Russia: Alisa Green. She was excited about the idea of The Cosmonaut. By then, she was creating her own company: Phenomena Films.

The year after, in the festival of Berlin, we reached an agreement for her to involve in coproduction. She was going to provide the film, through different investors, with €120,000 and some €30,000 more of her work and her team's that she was going to capitalize.

She was going to take 30% of the future benefits of the project in exchange.

It is obvious that it was really, really good having someone who understood the project, and who would be essential for the shooting in Latvia and Russia. We enthusiastically announced it to you.

For the next months, she did her job efficiently: she organized the shooting of winter shots in Moscow, she contacted us with Forma Pro Films, the Latvian producer who would be the key to organize the production service in Latvia and, literally, who saved the shooting (without them we could not make the film) and also organized the shooting in Moscow.

After several long excuses, just one week to the shooting, she confessed that her investor was not going to invest in our film. You all know the result: she was about to terminate three years of hard work and the will of thousands of you (and our careers as well). Thanks to the huge effort made by the community, by you, we saved The Cosmonaut at the very last moment by raising €131,000 in less than one week. Thanks to that we could finally finalize the shooting.

There are some other unfulfilled promises. Alisa Green didn't meet any of the deadlines, the dates; she failed to keep all the conditions. Nowadays, we haven't received our money yet and we decided to break our relationship with her. Yes, we have that 30% of the film again, but the rage, frustration and uneasiness will stay for long. She left us with a lot of problems, she have gambled with our work, with our (actually your) money and with the will of many people.

They say these things are pretty common in cinema. We are new and we have few resources, so this was a real blow, and we almost couldn't cope with it. That's why we only want to tell you about it and share it with you so you can be up to date with her behaviour in this project, just in case you meet her in your professional future.

As we said at the beginning: Shit Happens. Luckily, we will be able to show you the first trailer of the film soon and keep on going forward, as usual.

Kisses!

Stand up comedy Clapboard

When we were producing Pendiente de Título, we had a motto: We are all Sound. The boompole went from hand to hand every day.

The Cosmonaut, the short film

A couple of days ago, we received a surprising e-mail. It was David Altrogge writing. He is the director of an American production company settled in Indiana (Pennsylvania) called Vinegar Hill.

David told as that he knew about us by chance, surfing in MUBI Garage. He was surprised when he found us, because he was about to finish a short film entitled exactly the same as our movie. But coincidences do not end up in the title.

They are also using crowdfunding, through Kickstarter in their case. They have been really successful, by the way. Four days before finishing the funding, they had gone beyond what they intended to get.

There are also some similarities in the story and approach. You only have to see their great trailer (you have it at the end of the post), or just read the short text they describe their short film with:

The Cosmonaut is a science fiction... a love story... a fairy tale... It's the story of a young man who left earth once upon a time and has now returned to find that everything has changed...

In short, after reading their e-mail, we were actually as astonished as them. Nicolás says that he had never believed in serendipity until then. We wanted to share this small miracle with you, and we want to wish them the best luck in public. We hope to meet them anytime in the future. Perhaps in a festival? It would be great news for both projects.

Nicolas' movies

Some days ago, Proyecto Chapa left us a comment in the blog inviting us to participate in a meme. It basically consists in in quoting five films available at Google Video, to commemorate in a way its permanent closure.

We have decided to take up the challenge, but we are going to modify the proposal a bit: we are going to quote more than five films, even though there are just two of them available on Google Video. The list consists of the films our Director Nicolás has been watching lately, as an inspiration for the shooting. Some of them include some of his comments.

Last Tango in Paris
This is one of the reasons why I make movies. Furthermore, if I'm asked to define what a film consists of, what a script means, what is to create a story, if I had to talk about characters, about camera movements, about lightening or about music, this would be the movie I would always use as an example.

Elephant

Last Days

Paranoid Park

Apocalypse Now

Good Will Hunting
What a film. I have decided that I like Matt Damon.

Heaven
Seriously, if I ever make a single film like Heaven, please, kill me, because I would have reached perfection and any other thing would be worse. Bufff.

Braking the Waves

Nostalghia

Silent light

The Mirror

Breathless.

Nosferatu

Bonnie & Clyde

Paper Soldier

Fata Morgana

Most of the team freak out with these films as well as Nicolás. So, if you haven't seen any of them, here you have a recommendation from all of us.

Gagarin the caterpillar

Moonbase Alpha, the video game from NASA

Audi Mag

Charlie Burton, who has already reviewed us in Wired UK, is now doing a whole report for Audi Magazine UK , and they sent us a photographer from London for the photo session.

He is Sam Barker , and this is how Fuencarral looked this morning. :)

Destination: the Moon (that's how Russia saw it in 1955)

A great article in English Russia about how a Russian artist's view on the Soviets conquering the Moon in 1975... in 1955.

Pay attention to the Meliesque and  Lang-like details, such as the launching from a launch pad on the Urals, the diving helmets, the rocket's inner space... not to miss. 

Soviet space emblems in the cosmos

 Gabriel García, a follower of the project and a writer in the very interesting Zemiorka (a blog about astronautics and cosmonautics since, quoting their own words, 'anything can be related, in some way, to Sputnik') sends us to the link for one of the articles about the Soviet emblems carried by the various USSR Space missions. They were made of titanium, which is resistant to hostile atmospheres such as that of Venus, interestingly, 'one of the planets wich were privileged by the Soviet space program'. 

Russian films to sink a battleship

We're flipping out after finding the birubirFilm channel on Youtube, This channel's full of Russian cinema, both modern and from the Soviet era. You can find films ranging from Andrei Tarkovsky's cult ones to great classics such us The Irony Of Fate. Also, there's plenty of animation cinema and hard-to-find rarities; all of them with English subtitles (they're also available on Veoh).


The truth is that such an amount of materials can be overwhelming at first sight, and it's hard to know where to start, so... do you feel like recommending your favourite Russian films in 'comments'?

Lost in Space

Some people believe that somewhere out in the vast darkness of Space, at about 15,000 million kilometres from the Sun, the first human being is about to cross the border of our Solar System to interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at -270ºC. His little capsule's been silently drifting away from Earth at 29,000km/h for the past 45 years. He's the original lost cosmonaut whose spaceship ascended but, instead of descending afterwards, it simply kept following its course.


It's the latest fashion in Cold War legends: that in the origin of the Space era (in the late 50s and during the 60s), the Soviet Union had two Space programs; one of them was public and the other one was 'dark' and, in this one, they carried out much riskier missions, even suicidal. It was assumed that the Russia's dark operations, had they ever existed, would be kept a secret forever.

Lost in Space is an article compiling some of the stories about cosmonauts lost in Space during the first years of the Space Race. The connecting thread is the story of Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, two Italian brothers whose peculiar hobby was to intercept radio transmissions from Soviet spaceship. The brothers claim having been able to record, more than once, the last moments of the Soviet cosmonauts who died during failed missions.

"Come in... come in... come in... Listen! Come in! Talk to me! I am hot! I am hot! Come in! What? Forty-five? What? Fifty? Yes. Yes, yes, breathing. Oxygen, oxygen... I am hot. This... isn't this dangerous?"

Today we know that the brothers were being watched by the KGB. It was probably their big shot to fame (after appearing on the Fiera di Sogni contest, where they won the opportunity of visiting the NASA) what saved their lives. Nearly half a century afterwards, in a completely different context, a KGB agent in charge of the brothers agrees to being interviewed anonymously.

"They had to be dealt with - an accident perhaps - but then that TV programme happened and they were famous. That saved their lives. I was glad; they were good kids."

Also horrifying are the statements by Mikhail Rudenko (a retired aerospace engineer), in which he talks about the suicidal missions undertaken by three cosmonauts between 1957 and 1959, who were simply launched to Space without anything which might enable them to get back into the atmosphere.
 Most of the statements about the obscure beginnings of the Space Race are not backed by any source. However, it's notorious the ability with which the Soviet Uniot has hidden the existence of certain facts or people. They've simply been erased from History. Although it may remind you of the ineffable Ivan Istochnikov case, the story of cosmonaut Grigoriy Nelyubov -a founding member of th Sochi Six who was 'erased'- is the perfect example.



Engineer and journalist Jim Osberg -famous for his sceptical view on conspiracy theories- has written two interesting articles in which he presents the reasons why he doesn't believe the Judica-Cordiglia story, based on the lack of evidence and some illogical facts. You can read them here and here  (PDF, 116KB y 48KB).

Fernando Bovaira

Fernando Bovaira is the producer of all Amenábar's films.

       .... and in this report on La 2 RTVE, in minute 4:49, he talks about us.But he doesn't know it :P

Space Race Chronologies

Thanks to our indescribable friends from Microsiervos, we've found this very decorative poster, by the Visual Aid guys:

The problem? Image resolution is quite poor... As usual, Wikipedia came to our rescue:

Although if you find so much detail a bit confusing, this other chronology, available on A Single Pixel and designed with TimeFlyer, will surely be much more precise:

Greetings from Siberia!

Anything that can possibly go wrong, does.

-- Murphy's Law

If a series of events can go wrong, they will do so in the worst possible sequence.

-- Murphy's Extended Law

Smile. Tomorrow can be worse.

-- Murphy's motto

Here we are. The weather outside is frightful... and we don't have heating.

Project SpaceDiver... or how we learned to stop worrying and fall down to the Earth in 10 minutes

Through the Microsiervos website, we've heard of an interesting initiative originally published on Wired Science. It seems that the company Orbital Outfitters -which does development and construction of materials to be used in outer space- has its mind set on designing a new astronaut costume, which would allow jumping off and landing safely (and sound?) from a mere 36,500 metres height at least.

 

For what we've been told, the aim of the project isn't to break a record but to allow the evacuation of special suborbital spaceships in case of an emergency. And the thing is that with a leap from such an altitude, the secret ingredient is not in the sauce... but in the costume. Main problems? Lack of pressure and oxygen, temperature, friction... and the huge speed  you can reach during the fall: several thousands of kilometres per hour (blimey!) 

The costume shall include, among other things, the following requirements:

• Give vital support over the height of 150 km for 15 minutes
• Be light (less than 20Kg in weight)
• Allow parachute use 
• Offer free mobility

Ok, like we said: let's see who's the fearless tough guy who'd do the inaugural test to see if it works :^)

Fly me to the Moon... and let me take pictures among the stars

 

We discovered a few days ago (via Alt1040, an endless source of great materials for all those photography, science and technology lovers) a terrific piece of news. The photograph considered by many journalist at the time to be 'this century's image',  Earth as seen from the Moon, has been restored.

Thanks to the technological resources and tools available nowadays, the picture (originally taken on August, the 23rd 1966) has undergone drastic and evident improvement. This is all part of a project started 20 years ago by Nancy Evans, which was completed a little bit more than a year ago by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing from Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, which belongs to our beloved NASA.

The increase in quality seems incredible, compared to the original image... Besides the fact that this other image, taken in colour 8 years later, has ended up being better known. Which one do you choose? 

A trainee's diary

Well yeah, the title sounds like one from a porn film. But no.

The thing is that a couple of months ago we were joined by Alicia, who is doing the training programme of the Instituto Puerta Bonita. And we -because we're a little mean- suggested a challenge:

To create, during the four months she was going to be with us, her own blog with weekly videos in which she would tell her experience. She'd be in charge of promoting them, increasing visits, recording, producing and posting the videos... That is, what any creator should know how to do nowadays. ;)

El trato era que nosotros le haríamos un post, y nada más. Así que... a partir de ahora queda completamente a su suerte. Y a vuestro criterio :P

The deal was that we would write a post and nothing else. So... from now onwards it all depends on her. And on your judgment :P

Enjoy:
http://mensajesdesdelaluna.blogspot.com/

The proof of her videos is in the pudding:

"To Infinity... and beyond!" GigaGalaxy Zoom

(Above:The Milky Way)

Through 3 gigantic images, the GigaGalaxy Zoom project reveals, in the first place, a sight of the night sky at first glance from one of the areas with the highest level of darkness at night: the Atacama dessert, in Chile. From this first image, you can zoom in on an area of the Milky Way. And after this, finally, we have the possibility of going even further and immersing into the details of the nebula, as if we were looking at it with a professional telescope.

In this article by Javier Pedreira, published in Microsiervos, we have a more thorough summary of what you can find in the official website and in the three pictures:

The first picture, taken by Serge Brunier, gathers in 800 million pixels a first sight of the night sky, but from the privileged observatories of La Silla and El Paranla.

The second, created by Stéphane Guisard, gathers in 340 million pixels the central part of our galaxy, from the Sagittarius constellation to Scorpio.

The third picture shows only a degree and a half of a sky's square, centred on the Lagoon Nebula, just the way professional astronomers see it.

This project has been developed for the celebration of The International Astronomy Year 2009 and the images have been taken from the observatories of La Silla and Paranal.

 

(Above: The Lagoon Nebula)

As specified in the official website:

The project reveals three amazing, ultra-high-resolution images of the night sky that online stargazers can zoom in on and explore in an incredible level of detail.

The GigaGalaxy Zoom project thus illustrates the vision of IYA2009, which is to help people rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky.

In the official GigaGalaxy Zoom website you can not only have access to the afore-mentioned pictures and travel around Space through them, but you can download them too.

Undoubtedly, it's worth having a look (or many) at them. They're amazing.

 

 

Ubiquity

Appart from Power to the Píxel (London), we are exposing our project in Invesnova, the Innovative Companies Forum. But what are we doing here, you wonder?

What are we talking about? You have it right here, in a Power Point document!

(Yes, it's true, that's 25 MB. A lighter version will be ready very soon.)

Follow it on Twitter :)