Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematograficos UNAM, Mexico

2006 Latin American Region Kodak Filmschool Competition Winner, Andres Garcia Franco
La Invencion

“Cannes has been for some years now a place where movies from my country are highly appreciated,” Andres Garcia Franco says of his experience at the prestigious International Festival de Film. In recent years, Mexico’s film tradition has been regarded with increasing fascination and respect, from Pedro Almodovar to Alfonso Cuaron.

Franco’s short film “La Invencion” (The Invention) appeared at the 2007 Festival as part of Kodak's Emerging Filmmaker Program. “Of course it was a great experience with the helpful ‘protection’ of the Kodak team,” he recounts. “By this way, we were not lost amidst the millions of people that attend the festival.”

“La Invencion” has been receiving plenty of attention, garnering special mention in the San Sebastian Film Festival last year. In addition, Franco has been awarded with a Fulbright Scholarship to complete an MFA in film at the San Francisco Art Institute. Through this program, he’s received the support to pursue his next project, a short animated film titled “The Night of the Coffin”.

The animated fantasy, based on a short story, requires a very unique visual style. The supernatural tale is populated entirely by corpses, and involves, according to Franco, “a coffin which if bought by a dweller on a cold night. Since he is a male he thinks he is going to be paired up with a female corpse but he gets a great surprise when he realizes that the corpse is a big man. In a sudden rage he throws the corpse out of himself but quickly it is put back inside. The coffin faints and dreams of female corpses drifting along with him underwater. The next morning the coffin wakes up inside the crypt where he is going to spend the rest of his days.”

The supernatural aspects of this story provide Franco with many opportunities to employ his unique visual sensibilities. His influences include Gustavo Rocha, Guy Maddin, and Robert Lepage, all filmmakers known for their offbeat visuals. “These film artists always deal with the physicality of the medium as well with a performance experimentation of the actors” Franco says. He is applying these influences to “The Night of the Coffin”, using saturated colors, unique light sources, and a very unique treatment of his protagonists.

“[They] will not be balanced to daylight to reinforce the non-realistic look of this world where coffins are the characters.” Due to the spontenaiety of the project, Franco is acting as his own Director of Photography. This allows him to tie the themes he wishes to address to the visual style. “The grain will be evident on the images to demonstrate the materiality of the negative, in relation to the materiality of the protagonists,” Franco explains, “and of course the depth of the photographic blackness is of high importance to give a sense of death and limbo.”

To get the desired effect, Franco photographed his stills with a Nikon F3 camera onto Kodak 35mm Professional UltraColor 400 film. All elements-characters, backgrounds, et cetera-were photographed separately for the purpose of animating them in layers. “I pushed the original still photo negative to bring the grain out of the 400 Ultra color negative. Since the animation and editing process is going to be done in HD, it was important for me to make evident the emulsion materiality of the image.” This proved difficult; when Franco pushed the film from one to three stops during processing, the blacks resisted and the grain was hard to bring out.

By making the viewer aware of the film’s material nature through its grain, Franco meant to purvey the spirit of his project. “The initial interest was to make a low-cost animation project that ran away from the human egocentrism of film stories,” Franco describes his intent in telling a story which involves no (living) human subjects. “I wanted to tell a story about things…the only humans that will be photographed will be the corpses (actors), to emphasize that the bodies become objects after death.”

As a filmmaker, Franco is constantly evolving and finding stronger ways to express his already-strong vision. “I am trying to do more color now; I used to work mainly with black and white negatives, since it is easier to develop by myself. But that always somehow limits the ways you can tell a story because the eye needs more time to read the image.” In acting as his own cinematographer, Franco continues the singularity of his filmmaking.

Today’s innovations allow Franco to be a one-man animation house in a way which technology even ten years ago would not have facilitated. ”Most of the stories I want to tell include a certain amount of special effects and playfulness with the camera,” he says.  “The advances in technology make you feel safer doing this kind of risky experiment.”

With “The Night of the Coffin”, Andres Garcia Franco is attempting to make a visually lush animated project with the least production requirements possible. “It is a short film that is not aiming to a specific pre-thought product, but is meant to be a result of the process of making it,” explains Franco. “I like to be controlling every aspect of the technical craft, even if I couldn’t do it only by myself. For the technicality of my films to come through to the spectator always, this to break the limits of craft and entertainment.”