"Cargam" is a transmedia film project produced by Guatemalans Rodolfo "Chofo" Espinosa and Ximena Uribe. Transmedia because it was a project built on digital platforms with the direct participation of the audience, who had the opportunity to participate in the creation of the concept, the choice of actors and actresses, the name of the film, the financing and the project.
By: Irene García
Since the beginning of last August, when it was released, until today, Cargam: it's a C and a G, has been played hundreds of times on the Vivelo platform, where it is hosted. The film, made in record time (one week!), is about Cargam, a cultural management company run by Bruno.
Directed by Rodolfo "Chofo" Espinoza and produced by Ximena Uribe, the film features the participation of Valentina Espinosa, Rodolfo's daughter, and a large cast of non-professional actors and actresses, such as Zenayda Rojas, Toby Cortés, Jimmy Cárdenas, Lilian González, Diego Arango, Marco Xicay, Alejandra Campollo, Michelle Tello, José Medina, Erick Poroj, Diego Escobar, Mona Göbel, Geovany Tixal, Armando Sosa, Rodrigo Álvarez.
In this two-part interview, Espinoza and Uribe explain the process of creating and producing the film.
What was the experience of making the film like?
Rodolfo Espinosa: The experience of making the film is a combination of approaches that I have wanted to put into practice for a couple of years, both for didactic purposes and to make low-budget films, especially for beginners, for people who always have the impetus to make their first film, but encounter many obstacles, most of which they put themselves in order not to start; so that, somehow, they can find the way to encourage them to do it.
Ximena Uribe: From my point of view, it was also to take advantage of the fact that I found someone who instead of telling me no, told me yes, let's try, let's look. And after finding someone who said yes to me, to learn. Because I knew absolutely nothing about production, I had never done it in my life; writing I had done, but I had never written a feature film, and so it was about filling those holes I had in my experience; also to create a creative space where we could do and say what we wanted.
Why did you choose Xela as the location for the film?
Rodolfo Espinosa: First, for many years I have had the intention of decentralizing Guatemalan cinema. I have always wanted to decentralize, I don't like the capital; and second, I wanted to work with people from the interior, (although) it was not 100% achieved, there are a lot of people who are not from the capital working on this project. Xela has been very kind to me since the first film, since Aquí Me Quedo, and the people there are very willing to support artistic projects. I have a very strong connection with Quetzaltenango, with Xela. One of the premises is that you have to connect with the place you are talking about, where you are taking the story from; maybe Ximena didn't connect so much, but her character flowed, her character is from the capital and goes to a place she doesn't know, Ximena Uribe: At the beginning I was telling them no, because we were looking in this project to do everything within our reach, and at that time what was within our reach was the capital, Choifo's house and Antigua, and we didn't like any of the options. Chofo, excited, said Xela, and I said "no, let's do it nearby, I don't think it would be good there". And yes, Xela is like that, the people are much warmer, in Xela it is easier to move around, logistically too, for the week of shooting it was much better for us to do it in Xela. We went from location to location, it was much easier there than in the city, in the end I also ended up having a connection with Xela. And it just made me want to go back again to try other things, it felt like a space where we could play or where we could try all these things that we like. And yes Xela was a good decision.
What was the casting process like?
Rodolfo Espinosa: There are always two factors or variants when casting: first, when you write the script you already think of certain actors to play the roles and that helps develop the character, and then you have to fill in the spaces where you know you need a character, but you haven't really visualized it yet. In the case of Cargam, the film was written as we were producing it, we had to have actors to continue developing the characters. Although there was a macho idea of how to play the character, they were not so complete because we didn't know them all yet; we knew that Ximena was going to act, that I was going to act, and maybe my girlfriend was going to act. We put out an online call to find the other characters, and most of them were from Xela.
Ximena Uribe: We knew we didn't have the time or the money to look for a place and do the castings in person, as they are normally done; we also didn't have the time or the space on cards or a hard drive where we could record all the castings and have that material and review it again and make it traditional. So we went for a Google Forms with four monologues of different characters, what we wanted was for people to choose a monologue, we wanted to see how with their personality they could interpret that monologue or how well they knew each other or how natural they could be in front of the camera. People would choose one, record themselves doing the monologue, send us the video and we would review it. We weren't looking for someone specific, the only person who matched what we had in mind was Irene Pellecer, who plays the role of Mayka; since we saw her casting we couldn't stop laughing because she was exactly what we wanted. She was one of the first people we chose; from there we went little by little choosing those who were more natural, those who we saw that they matched her personality a little more; then we had meetings with those five people, calls, we wanted to see how interesting they were as people and how much they could contribute to the character.
What is the reason for the name "Cargam"?
Rodolfo Espinosa: There is a term called transmedia, which means that there is also interaction with the audience, and the audience also begins to create by-products that are part of the film in their own way. Many times they made us trailers for the movie that we didn't make, but they are included within the universe of Cargam or the universe of our profiles. Let's put it this way, we became characters for people, for our audience. They made memes and stickers for us, there were jokes that we made with Ximena that started to be replicated outside. Being honest when it comes to being upset with what people do, many of our haters turned out to be fans because they knew in depth what bothered us, and that is also part of the promotion of the film; that is transmedia. Many of the decisions that were made come from our interaction with the audience, the concept of transmedia I've been bringing it since I learned it, trying to apply it for about a year.
Ximena Uribe: The story of Cargam is what happened to Chofo and me, managing projects for the Ministry of Culture and Sports, which was not a very nice experience, because we are talking about failure, and it was a bureaucratic, boring, hard experience and they were trying us to do something that does not fascinate us, but we were doing it and in those hours we were spending doing budgets, schedules, letters for I don't know who. I said we were working at Cargam, this is Cargam we are doing. And then I started to say: "I am a girl from Marro and with Jean Carlos we are managing some projects". So Chofo laughed a lot and it was a joke that we kept working on at the Ministry of Culture and Sports, and from there when we started to see what we would do in the film, Chofo said "let's talk about what just happened to us at the Ministry of Culture and Sports", and I said, "let's talk about Cargam". And in the videos we started to discuss the name and I discussed the fact that Chofo didn't want it to be called Cargam, because I didn't understand what he was saying, and I liked it because Chofo was bothered by the fact that it was called Cargam. Then I think that what Chofo said about transmedia, people started to discuss it in the comments, in the live comments we discussed that Cargam should stay, that Cargam should stay. There was no turning back, if we wanted to change the name it was going to be more difficult but the most logical thing was to keep the name Cargam, so that's why Cargam stayed, because of what Chofo said about transmedia and it also comes from a joke of ours that went out to the social networks.
Original publication: Agencia Universitaria de Noticias
Author: Irene García Alvarez
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