A New Season, A Sale!

It’s terribly cold in Bolivia these days and this week we enter a new season, WINTER!

It means it will get even colder and we need to warm up!

If the weather had been like this back in June and July of 2023 we would not have ventured to shoot Seditiosa. We would’ve postpone the production of the film where three beautiful ladies had to work without clothes for most of it until the harsh winter was over, maybe until August, to prevent having three beautiful sick ladies. Postponing the production would’ve made a lot of people MAD! It would’ve been postpone, for sure. The safety of our actresses is paramount.

This year the winter is a lot colder. Really a lot. Jac was considering shooting some interior scenes with Dani but he doesn’t feel comfortable with the weather the way it is and he definitely doesn’t want Dani to get sick. As a matter of fact Jac has a cold, which he is fighting courageously with little success.

There won’t be any shooting with beautiful ladies without clothes suffering torture in the near future. Most of the work is with computers in cold offices, no central heating in La Paz, with the assistance of cats who also complain about the cold.

Meanwhile, a question came up, to my inbox, which needs responding.

So what is the status of the preparations for the filming of the crux series? All the cast lined up, locations booked, props ready or on order?

Crucified Four, the crux series, is in the pre production stage. The principal cast is lined up, the rest of the cast is pending until we have the results of how much money we have for the film. That will affect the number of people we will be working with and who those people will be.

The principal location is all set, the additional locations are still to be decided, those are mostly interiors. That’s another issue also waiting for the results of how we are doing with the money. There are two specific locations that we might use, which have the elements the film needs, but it depends on whether we can afford them, not just the fees, but also the decorations, the time we will need them for, etc.

The props and costumes are mostly ready, in a couple of weeks we will have Dani’s costume. The principal props for the crucifixions will be set up a couple of days before the production begins. That’s how it normally works.

How the props will look like, how many different crosses will be built and so on depends a lot on the script, the means at hand, the physical possibilities, the capacity of the actresses to work on the conditions set for those crosses, and so on. For instance Ligia has to be crucified upside down for her second crucifixion, and has to be suspended upright with heavy logs nailed to her feet for her third crucifixion. How to manage that will take some work.

I can’t even begin to describe what will happen to Dani in the film. The logistics of how to stage her extremely nasty crucifixion and make it both horribly looking while being safe for her are very difficult and require a lot of planning and elaborate testing.

There will be tests for everything when the time comes, at least one week before production begins, just like there were when we prepared the production of Seditiosa.

A bit of prophetic thinking and foretelling in these difficult days. Botanists speak of “serotiny,” a plant’s ability to delay seed release until the environment is just right. Some pinecones, for instance, only open after a fire. The coming weeks will offer catalytic conditions—perhaps metaphorical heat, perhaps general disruption, perhaps incredible and not anticipated joy—that will be exactly what’s needed to unleash the fertile potency of the coming projects. We have faith that our seeds will draw on their own wild intelligence.

But regardless of what the inner workings of fate plan to do, we must find those funds and that’s what we are dedicating a lot of our working time.

It is unfortunate that we only raised a little over 900 dollars of our 40,000 goal in the months we had our campaign going. That was discouraging to everyone involved and in a way squashed the general enthusiasm for the project.

That’s one reason there are no discussions, no casting calls, no rehearsing, nothing, unlike other times when we had a good number of people preparing a new film like Justine, with a nice sum of money in the bank to be used for the production.

We’re depending on what we have and what we are working on to increase our access to resources.

We are working on a few strategies which take some time and concentration, each with their own demands, methodology, system, possible problems, obstacles, decisions.

We don’t have big investors, which could help reach our goals, and we don’t expect to have them ever. What we have are our films and we’re exploring the different ways we can make them reach a lot more people and that’s that.

We can’t propose films like Crucified Four to major outlets like NatGeo. We can, however, propose to them a costly and major documentary and get a lot of cash for that, a lot of which we can use for our more demanding films. Jac gets paid a lot to produce those, on top of the cost of the production.

A documentary can cost over 100,000 USD. Jac’s first film cost half a million dollars. It was shot with film, the lab work alone cost around 200,000. Lots of traveling. Three different crews, a couple of famous cinematographers… even a symphony orchestra recording the music, expensive.

We will be announcing some possible ways of increasing our funds, in the meantime we have a New Season Sale. 15% Off in you buy two or more of our movies.

We hope to sell many, many films in the next couple of weeks. The SALE will be over next month.

In closing. We don’t have a date to start the production of Crucifed Four. We have the intention to begin sometime in August. The weather will be good between August and October, maybe part of November. The rainy season begins in full in December.

If we get enough resources, or at least it looks like some resources will be forthcoming, we’ll set the date. Once we set the date we’ll proceed to work on completing the casting, preparing the props, beginning rehearsals and all the pre production.
We’re in the dark right now and we’ll be like this for sometime until we launch the new strategies and begin to see the results. In the meantime there’s a song in my head. Que será será, what will be will be.