Cinema Verde helps Sentir El Son documentary secure a place on KPBS series VOCES with veteran cinematographer Mario Ortiz and his core team at CVP.
This film tells the story of an Afro-Mexican woman’s journey to discover her racial identity through music and dance. A powerful story of self-discovery, the film follows Franchesca, who grew up in L.A. and was immersed in a Mexican culture that forced her to question her racial identity. This poetic film explores ethnicity and gender through West African and Afro-Mexican practices in music, song, and dance. Producer/director, Karla Duarte collaborated with Mario Ortiz and Cinema Verde to film the short documentary with Blackmagic cameras and Sigma lenses.
BRAW CAPABLE CAMERAS
We chose to capture all of the images on the BMC Pocket 6k cameras shooting in BRAW, which gave us the most flexibility in post. Color was an important to Karla and by filming with these versatile cameras we were able to get the look she was after.
MOVEMENT
Gimbals and Steadicam was used to capture most of the dancing sequences in this film. We used a gimbal rig by Zhyan that mounted to our own Steadicam rig which made our camera operator comfortable and captured the dances in their entirety.
ROBOTIC CAMERA EFFECTS
The director wanted a way to visually display all of the women featured in the documentary in a creative way. Cinema Verde used its eMotimo 4-axis robotic camera system to accurately repeat moves so that the cast could disappear one by one as the camera moved from right to left.
The robotic slider system is also used for time-lapse photography and as a “B”- cam
interview camera.
“My collaboration with Cinema Verde was outstanding…I was able to share and express my needs and Mario was great at translating my ideas. He would guide me with the proper language of what we were aiming at and he was able to understand the visual color and with the use his awesome equipment, lighting & cameras, we were able to bring my creative vision to life.”
-- Karla Duarte
