Independent projects are extremely difficult. Most people are not financially secure to dedicate two years to the writing and preparation necessary to make a film. You take any job presented to you for survival, and make do with the remaining hours to pursue your real desires. A factory job packaging snow chains begins and ends early, good money and free afternoons. When the experience provides the inspiration and the story for your first film, it becomes that much better. The film characters are based on four real people who actually worked in the factory, two of them still do. Many events will appear similar to their lives during the winter campaign 2004.

at the factory:

As luck would have it, we were allowed to film in Jope S.A., the actual snow chain factory that had initially inspired us. During the month of August the factory closes down for its annual vacation, freeing up the ideal setting for our film with no inconvenience to its owners. We began our shoot on July 31st and finished four weeks later on August 26th, 2006. The story takes place in the winter, but what could we do? Pray to the gods to bring us a cloudy, overcast August. Maybe due to the praying or beginner’s luck, while everybody was complaining about the horrible weather of August, we were grateful for each cloud appearing in the sky, including that unexpected rain that fell at the right moment, when the shooting schedule required it. When there is no money to get a rain truck you can only hope for the natural rain.

budget? lot of snow, and enthusiasm, but not a dime.

Even though we tried to acquire funding from institutional grants, when none complied, we carried on and didn’t give up. If we had to wait to obtain all the money necessary to make the film under normal conditions, it would have taken too long or maybe we would have never done it. Therefore, we had to think about whether it was possible to produce the film with the little money we were able to gather and make a decision. We came up with a budget using our limited funds that came from our savings, friends and family.

We reduce the schedule to 4 weeks, 3 for the factory where most of the movie took place and one week for the rest of the locations. Friends that let us invade their homes for the shoot. Between them was the real Karmentxu´s house where Uxue (the real one) played herself.

We also reduced our technical support team to ten, many of whom included young, eager people looking for experience on a film crew.

We had the full support of Rob Webb, our director of photography, who traveled from Los Angeles with his camera equipment to aid us in our endeavor.

We used our inventiveness to make the best of the natural light, as we had very little lighting equipment at our disposal. We also made homemade dollies with two copper tubes and a cart for the camera that rolled on skate wheels. For the camera car we created a system based on magnets to hold skis.

The snow was a little bit more complicated, but as usual we got lucky. In a city close to Pamplona, they were throwing a party where they were using a soap machine. We realized that if we use the soap machine we could get the same effect as real snow. Luckily they let us borrowed the machine for a day. It wasn’t easy because in most of the shots big pieces of soap come out flying, but at the end we got it.

We asked our friends to work as extras. And our actors, although they may have come with a limited amount of acting experience, surprised us both with their talent and their dedication to our project.

Everyone shone as a true professional and without their support we would not have been able to complete this film.