POPPING CORN IN COLONIA

Director Luciano Podcaminsky talks us through his volcanic VW adventure with added popcorn.

When you receive a script involving a volcano, cars, kids, animals, popcorn.... tons of popcorn...you think that is a great opportunity to shoot a great film, with all the challenges ahead, moving forward with all the energy focused on the final goal of creating the best piece of work you can imagine.

The first thing to think about was finding a location which would create this fantastic situation of having our heroes throwing corn into a real volcano and then making this popcorn-rain in the village and making it believable. We knew that we couldn't go to a real volcano and make all our heroes burn in the hottest place on earth, so it had to be a good combination between a real location and post production work, all nicely mixed together. We had to look also for a place to concentrate all our locations in the same area, schedule-wise we were not able to be travelling around the globe, so we chose Uruguay and we flew there to scout.

After driving around for a couple of days we found everything we wanted within a decent travelling distance to get organised in a three day shoot. We needed a quiet village with no cars, cobblestone streets, old colonial style architecture, a small town frozen in time. We found that in Colonia, a small historical hot spot in Uruguay. The volcano landscape was the other challenge, we found a mountain area a couple of hours drive out of Montevideo, with dirt roads and hills which allowed us to build up the story of all these Saveiros going, loaded with corn, up the volcano to do the miracle.

Creating the popcorn-rain was the next step in the realistic feel we wanted to achieve. We wanted to do as much as possible in camera, so we had a local factory make more than 600kg of the stuff, two big trucks fully loaded with real popcorn. To shoot it into the air we used some compressed air turbines, like a foam snow machine, to create this real feel of having popcorn falling from the sky. The cleaning was a challenge too, we had a team of people helping to clean out the streets once we finished each set up to bring back everything to normal life in Colonia.

The key concern/challenge from the beginning was that it was the same agency, same production company, same client and all the same team who helped create the VW Dog Fish spot directed by Armando Bo that won gold in Cannes, so from the start there was a kind of good pressure. Apart from that, the competition on this job was hard too; we have to bid against Fernando Meirelles, the director of Brazilian film City of God and The Constant Gardener, so it was never easy.

What were the most challenging elements to organise?

The original idea with the agency was that the spot was based in a little town in Costa Rica called La Fortuna, where they have The Arenal Volcano. So that was the starting point, but we realised that the budget was not enough to shoot there and we also had some places in Chile where there are good volcanoes but the problem was that it was winter and those places in Chile were full of snow.

So...we put all the things in the balance and we agreed that the best solution was to go to Uruguay and then work with the backgrounds and the volcano in post production and make the popcorn rain for real in camera.

How did you find enough popcorn to shoot into the air?

It was not so easy because we were shooting in really small towns in Uruguay and we had to move everything from Montevideo. Luckily the crew at Oriental Films in Uruguay found this popcorn specialist and they managed to make enough for us.

How did you find the village?

We shot in Colonia del Sacramento (the parts of the popcorn rain and the village) and in the mountains of Minas all in Uruguay (for the crater takes and the car performance shots).

The idea was to have a place that look in a way like Peru, or Bolivia or the north of Argentina, so we have this place Colonia that was perfect because we really needed a small town, a place where cars are not allowed in the village, so when the Saveiros arrive is something really shocking for the people.

Were all the people in the film locals or did you bring in actors too?

Most of them were locals, because we really wanted to have real and natural faces, people that looked authentic and not actors. I really wanted to capture the magic and shoot people's faces and real reactions. People were really emotional and the moment was magic too, for real. Then, we used some actors, of course, for the drivers of the VW cars and the guys that throws the corn to the volcano.

What were the main emotions you wanted to convey with the spot?

We wanted to show the emotional part for the car as well, not only the practical thing that we all know, that these cars are great, they have a lot of capacity, etc, but we wanted to show that these cars always carry something else....they bring joy and fun to people in this little village lost in the middle of nowhere.

What were the biggest challenges on the shoot?

The weather, to be honest. I was worried about the wind and the sky because to fire popcorn into the air with wind is a hard task and also if we had a grey sky then we wouldn´t be able to see the white popcorn so that was a big problem, especially because at that time of the year the weather in Uruguay was so bad.

Then, there was a lot of challenges of course, but we were very relax and there was a great atmosphere during the shoot to be honest. There was no friction, we were a real team with the agency, the animation house, Bitt, the production service company in Uruguay, Oriental films, and the Argentine team from Rebolucion. We worked really hard as one team and you can see the difference when something like that happens.

Did anything unexpected happen?

Yes, the weather again, we were ready to shoot and there was like a week of rain and storm so we had to postpone all a week....nothing terrible but unexpected...you know?