Rodrigo Lopes de Barros has a B.A. in Law and a M.A. in Literary Theory from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). He is a PhD candidate at The University of Texas at Austin specialized in Cuban and Brazilian studies. He directed the short O Corpo and Collision is his second movie. Lopes de Barros has also published several articles on Brazilian and Cuban studies, which appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Alea: Estudos Neolatinos, Outra Travessia, Sopro, and others. He is also a creative writer and his short stories were published in literary magazines and newspapers such as O Estado de São Paulo (Estadão) and Livro: Revista do Núcleo de Estudos do Livro e da Edição, USP.

PegaPraCapá Produções is born from the need for a cinema to unlock the doors of the uncanny space between silences, without there being any validity to give them life, each of them remaining in ashes, in spaces dominated by nulity, in words dominated by void and void dominated by words. The production company begins in 2007 from the partnership between director Rodrigo Lopes de Barros Oliveira, screenwriter and actor João Pedro Garcia Garcia and the Instituto da Cultura e da Barbárie. The short film O Corpo (2012) was its first accomplishment. The cast of the film includes João Pedro Garcia, as well as actors Luiz Henrique Cudo and George França. The soundtrack is a partnership between João Pedro Garcia, Thiago Kremer Pizzeti and Stanley Tool Trio, with some of the songs written especially for the film. The script comes from discussions about the body, and that body permeates the narrative and causes its fragmentation. The direction signed by Rodrigo Lopes de Barros Oliveira is evident in the peculiar photography, in the lethargic and dense rythm and in the intimistic portrayal of the characters before the camera. A preview of this result may be seen here.

A new version of Collision’s script is on the air. We achieve the version 2.0, the first one that comes with alterations made by the director. It now becomes a shooting script. It means that there will not be any alterations in the story, only technical changes and minor additions by the director during the drill and shootings. Download it here.

Another music of Collion’s soundtrack is available: Lost, number 008, the first one that has a vocal. It is a fine composition by João Pedro Garcia. Listen to and download it here.

This post was to be published a long time ago, but now Collision’s blog is being updated again. So, you can find Rodrigo Lopes de Barros‘ text below. It is about the tension between piracy and open source software. A text that shows theoretically (from philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Agamben) the decision on producing Collision as an open source film, as the possibility of construction of other worlds. The text was published by Revista Espírito Livre, a journal directed by João Fernando Costa Júnior and specialized in open source software. Read the article here (page 81): http://www.revista.espiritolivre.org/?p=209

Now you can follow all updates from Collision through Twitter: just follow us on www.twitter.com/culturabarbarie. Besides the news about Collision, you can read everything that happens within the Instituto da Cultura e da Barbárie: a place that brings together artists and theorists with publications such as periodicals, books, and blogs. Collision is a project from the union between the Instituto da Cultura e da Barbárie and pegapracapá produções (Portuguese only)

This new posts contains two new songs: ‘fallen leaves‘ and ‘I am the belly of the worm‘. About the first one, it was an attempt to go more into the organic than I had before, to have something expressive using a smaller amount of musical elements, and dealing with less noise. The result is a simplistic arpeggio on the keyboard piano, accompanied by a solo on a cello (not a real cello, a keyboard cello). That part was pretty easy: just letting the creative juices flow. The next step was slowing down the recording for a more dramatic feel. The part that took up some of my time was arriving at the color I wanted for the sound. First with the equalization I settled for something that almost saturated at the low frequencies for the piano for impact and something with a little more shine (high-mid and high frequencies) for the cello. Then I gave it layers. It occurred to me that instead of searching for a good reverb effect in Audacity (one of the things I feel the program is lacking in) I could copy the same musical information on to a different track, apply an intense echo to that track and lower its volume, creating the effect of giving layers to the original track. This of course is imperceptible, and the effect ends up being similar to a good reverb. The next song was ‘I am the belly of the worm’. That song was pretty simple. I took an old recording of a violin (a real violin) that I had in my computer (Antonia Javiera recorded it for me, I give her credit) slowed it down a notch, made it repeat itself and added a speech synthesizer voice crying out the title of the song between another repetition of the same violin solo. I gave it layers as well, and the result is a nice rich sound that I had to alter very little, illustrating the staggering difference between analogic and digital, organic and synthetic.

This is a legendary Super 8mm. Produced between 1971 and 1974 by Rollei, this camera brings some essential characteristics for its use in Collision. We can start by the excellent optical composition, signed by the German company Schneider. Aside from that, the SL84 has the capacity to operate in three recording speeds: 18fps, 24fps and 54fps – that provides us with the possibility of an excellent slow motion (our Beaulieu, for example, has a maximum speed of 36fps). Another important point is that the Rollei, differently to a lot of cameras from the time, can automatically identify a varied range of film speeds (from ASA 16 to ASA 100). that allows the use of the new Kodak Ektachrome 64T without greater complications. Because of being relatively portable and discreet, this should be the camera that will be in Paul and Derek’s hands in the Collision scenes. Below are its technical specs.

Rollei SL 84
marketed in 1971
production: 1971-1974
silent super 8 cartridge
lens: Schneider-Kreuznach Neovaron f: 1.8 \ F: 7-70 mm (1)
zooming ratio: 10x
focusing: manual, cross hair focus,1.5 to infinity
zooming: auto and manual
filter size: 62 mm
viewfinder: single-lens reflex with adjustable eyepiece: +/- 5 diopters
viewfinder information: aperture scale, battery power too low (LED)
exposure: auto and manual exposure control; TTL EE, Cds cell
film speed: auto between 16/25 and 100/160 ASA (daylight/tunsten)
CCA filter: built-in 85A filter, with filter control switch
filming speed: 18, 24, 54 fps, single frame
interval timer: possible with accessory Cinetric
shutter opening angle: variable, <180 degrees
fading: auto fade-in/fade-out, 90 frames
lap dissolve: auto
sound: double-system, recording with synchronized tape recorder
remote control socket: no
2 cable release sockets: single frame and continuous running
movie light slot: rollei type
flash synchronization socket: yes (2)
film counter: yes
handle: fixed, chamber for penlight batteries
battery check button: signal in the viewfinder
power source: 6 x AA batteries only
weight: 1325 g
dimensions: 69 x 184 x 259 mm
tripod socket: 1/4″
made in Germany by Bauer

* (1) some cameras of this model have in the lens this: Rollei Vario f: 1.8 \ F: 7-70 mm
* (2)”the sync contact on the camera permits lip synchronized shootinh in conjunction with suitable sound synchronizing equipment”

So here are three new songs for the soundtrack. Let me tell you all a little bit about my process. I like to work with nice open afternoons where no one will nag me and I won’t have to be somewhere else in two hours. Having that kind of freedom is good for the creative juices to flow. These new songs were mostly done in the work of one such afternoon. I had the whole idea of utilizing noise in the songs, but something was missing, and I realized it was something more organic. My afternoon began with pressing the red button on my Zoom H2 digital recorder as I improvised on my bass. Mixing that to part of a guitar I had recorded earlier for another song (different project, I do that a lot) and a small part of some drums a friend of mine recorded (Alvaro from The Grind, I give him the credit) was what ended up constituting “warmbass”. All it took was a little tweaking to get it the way I wanted, the result is that kind of schizophrenic feel of the bass going one way freely and the guitar going straight and trying to grab the bass into it. Next was “Harp of God”. It started by playing the guitar. I realized if I could do a simple kind of mellow sequence of notes then I would have a simple song with a strong effect. By the time I had recorded the keyboard and was mixing I realized I has stumbled upon one of those lucky brakes that recording gives you. The sentence ‘my soul’ was taken from the vocals of one of my other songs and mixed first reversed than straight in various different speeds and tones. Hence the name ‘Harp of God’. After that it was time to take some inspiration from La Monte Young’s “The Tortoise His Dreams and Journeys”, something me and Rodrigo had seen years ago and it just stayed in the back of our heads, and try to recreate a similar texture considering the reality of the film we are making. The first thing I realized was that I needed an organic sound. If I did everything from the keyboard, or worse, from the computer, I would probably end up with a shallow digital sound. So again with my bass. Then I recorded three tracks of a continuous E flat in the keyboard and balanced the volumes between them to get the feel I wanted. I can say that these new songs have brought some interesting discoveries, such as learning even more how to work with audacity (which really is a very intuitive program), with getting closer to finding an aesthetic to the soundtrack of the film, and learning that organic elements work very well. I will be further experimenting with sounds, and I’ll keep you posted. Click here to download everything that is available from the soundtrack 

The first time I installed Linux was more than ten years ago. It was an AMD 586 100 MHZ, with 128 MB RAM. The Linux version, if memory serves me, was from Red Hat. Honestly, it was hell. Everything was too slow (with that processor you couldn’t expect much), but the computer ran Windows 98 with less effort. At that time, Linux was like a desert, almost impenetrable. It took me two weeks to install it, two more weeks to get dual boot, and another week to access the Internet. Not to mention that thinking of configuring the sound card, mp3, was a joke, impossible, at least for me. After that, came an AMD Athlon XP 2800 + (I’ve only had AMD in this life), but I never ran Linux in it, I had given up on the difficulty of the initial experiment: I followed the evolution of the system from the computer lab of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (LABUFSC), where I came to work when I was in Law school. When I chose, to make the open movie Collision, the Linux Ubuntu 8.10 operating system, all that suffering came back in an instant. I thought: not again. How good was the surprise. I installed Ubuntu on an AMD Turion X2 TL-60, 4GB RAM (which should be where I will edit the film, I hope it can take it, since the Cinelerra might work through proxy files for HDV editing, it will at least be where the images are captured): everything worked, even things I didn’t expect, like battery measuremnt and the external volume control for the laptop. Those guys really made a good job while I’ve been away. Only the video card, a ATI X1100, doesn’t go very well with the proprietary driver, and worst yet with Ubuntu’s open driver. I hope that until August some update is made, but if there is nothing new, we’ll use what we have.