Talking about "Heraion - In Search of Life" is talking about a journey through the world and through creativity, and how a project itself can be sort of alive along its process of development.
What do I mean by that?

Let´s go to March 2012, when I finished Aeterna. I talked to Mahal Style, (an interactive online community that provides fashion and beauty insight through cutting-edge, artistic web mediums, including videos and interactive forum galleries),  whom I met at LJFFF 2011 and became good friends.
They had already collaborated with me by translating and recording the audio for Aeterna into English, and also Llagas, one of my horror films (Nicole Quiroz was very kind with me and my English grammar failures). 
So when I proposed Minh Huynh, director of Mahal Style, to do a co-production for ending the 3NESIS trilogy, he luckily agreed.

My idea was to split the project in 3; the introduction would be done in 3D animation, the second part was going to be shot in the US and another part in Valencia (Spain).
The prologue was created together with Sergio López, Aeterna´s VFX artist, and this was the only 100% planned part.

For the other two, I just felt I wanted to go into nature with a few ideas and shoot what I would find there. That´s the main idea behind Heraion, Nature is the base of everything; wild, charming, full of secrets, and art comes from it. And so does fashion, music, everything. That´s why I ran away from baroque sets like Aeterna or theaters with controlled light like Eiénesis.

Of course there was a story-line and a background, I knew what I wanted to tell and some of the characters I needed (for example the painter of the first part) but the rest... the rest was just dark and unknown.

After a lot of Skype meetings with Mahal Style team, we decided to shoot the US part after my attending La Jolla Fashion Film Festival 2012 with Aeterna. Said and done, the festival ended Saturday 28th July and on Sunday 29th we travelled to Salton Sea.

For people who know that place, they would say that it's not a very pleasant option: the heat is so brutal, with a lot of humidity.  Salton Sea is a very difficult place to shoot. But we, a little team composed of 9 people, were sure that it wouldn´t be that bad. And, in fact, it was not.

The morning of the shooting, Minh (producer and director of photography of the US part) and I started looking for the set to shoot, so we drove all the way up and down until we found the perfect place: the desertic mountain.
But suddenly, very bad news came to us. The model had forgotten that she had to come and we were not going to be able to shoot with her. That was a very difficult moment, but in a couple of minutes, after thinking Heraion was going to fail, Minh came to the idea of calling Makaela Maran, another model that he knew and, luckily, she agreed to come. Krissy Fernández with Gabriel Grover, from Junk & Po (photographer and graphic designer of Heraion), went to get her.
Meanwhile Jeannette Jordana, Paula Ramos and Anji Becker were planning all the making of, styling and production needs.

So, everything was fine again. The mountain scene was going to be hard, even more because I just improvised it, the script said nothing about a mountain, but I just felt it was the perfect place.

Makaela and the rest of the team arrived from San Diego. Rochelle Sunglao started to do the make up and dressing of Makaela. For Heraion, I have to say that costume designer Osbaldo Ahumada did an amazing job; his dress (specially designed for Heraion) was awesome and it also becomes a character in the story, it seemed to be alive.

When Rochelle was done with the make up we were ready to start shooting, but Mother Nature spoke: rain. Our poker faces were as funny as the fact that, in summer, it rains on the desert.
But that was OK... we were young and passionate, so we decided to go for it. The result are powerful and intense images in a place that looks like another planet; it seemed that fate wanted Heraion to be special.

 

The shooting went on for an hour, we had to move the crane to the top of the mountain, manage the enormous dress, the prosthetics (the model had to look like she was pregnant), and the sun light fell down quickly. Makaela had no shoes while walking through the wet sand and we had to move very careful because there were a lot of broken crystals on the ground. But we made it.

The second day, after sleeping in a sort of "Bates Motel" (and, during the night, telling a lot of horror stories to enjoy ourselves a little bit), we drove to the lake of Salton Sea, to shoot the original scene that was on the script.

That part was amazing, the place looked so beautiful, charming and mysterious. The sand are just bones of dead fish, we saw an enormous dead pelican, the coyotes eating the dead fish... It was like a cemetery made of water (due to its high level of salt, like the Dead Sea).

The set was done by putting together some abandoned items that we found in the place (for example the sofa for depicting a sort of "throne"). We just made the "temple", the "Heraion", with garbage we found.

When that part was finished, we travelled back to San Diego and just enjoyed the rest of the days until I had to come back to Spain to continue shooting at Llumm Studios.
The funny part was that I really didn´t know what I was going to shoot next to link the previously shot material. Again, I had to improvise... As you will see in the next post.

Art by Hugo Saláis

Meanwhile, the making of the rainy mountain shooting...