SUITE SELFIE

A few months ago, we received an interesting order. On the occasion of the centenary of Madrid's Plaza Mayor, Photoespaña sought to produce, with the patronage of Samsung, a VR piece for this year's festival.

For this they had Miguel Ángel Tornero, a photographer who, although he had not worked with VR-360º tools to date, does have an interesting and extensive work that questions, among other things, the way we approach and consume images in the age digital, and this from the perspective of everyday life.

Our job would be to advise and carry out the VR piece together with Miguel Ángel. We had several initial meetings so that he became familiar with the VR language, and we with his work to see the best way to combine the proposed theme (the main square), the author's own speech and the VR-360º narrative.

Various ideas arose, such as turning ourselves into the statue of Felipe III, and from that privileged view jumping, and wandering around the square and the city. We also considered the option of working with the electronic "error" produced from forcing the software of stiching (image stitching) when stitching together impossible images. As Miguel Ángel learned more about the technology, more ideas and new approaches arose to approach the project.

Finally we opted for an approach that would create an image in line with the work that the author has been developing.

The proposal consisted of filming in 360º, from one of the busiest points of the square for a whole day. Miguel Ángel, in previous visits to the square, had observed how a large number of tourists gathered in front of the statue of Felipe III. These arrived they became a selfie or they took a picture of the statue and continued. There was a continuous wandering around an imaginary circle that was repeated over and over again.

Starting from that simple idea; Placing the camera in the center of this continuous traffic of people, the next step would take us, already in the post-production room, to freeze each and every one of those people who stopped to photograph and be photographed.

With that starting point, and already knowing how we wanted to materialize it, we only had to get down to work and shoot. And this is where the story gets more complicated. Due to the dates, and to the commemorations of the centenary of the square, it is rare the day in which it is not full of scaffolding, stages, installations, etc. This hinders the creation of the mental image that we have, as it hinders the wandering of the tourists that we had observed.

After several calls and negotiations, we managed to foresee a period of two to three days in which it seems that the square is going to be "clean" of elements, and finally on a Wednesday, with all the requested and granted permits, we set out to shoot.

We placed the camera, at the point that we had agreed on in the previous locations, we ballasted the equipment so that it would not tip over and not move, we placed tape to make it more visible and prevent people from getting too close, which would cause us problems in post-production.

Once all this is done, we start recording, watching from a nearby terrace. When shooting in 360º, that moment of "going out of the shot" is typical and even comical, since there are usually few options where to hide from the camera, in this case I think it has been one of the most comfortable occasions having a "relaxing cup of café con leche in plaza mayor” what more could you ask for?

At sunset, we collected our equipment and returned to the production company. After the laborious process of stitching images, we finally have before us what we had been imagining in the previous days. People and more people wandering around and taking pictures. We edited the part that seemed most interesting to us both for the number of people and for the quality of light: a fragment that corresponds to about two hours of filming between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.

These two hours were sped up to a duration of 2:30 minutes. Later we were identifying the moments in which the characters took images and we were freezing them. Finally, we assigned a piano note depending on the distance at which they were found, with the closest characters being the highest notes, and the furthest away being the lowest notes, resulting in this peculiar suite, which in the words of Michelangelo himself : “reflects on the daily use of the image as a language and on photography democratized to the point of becoming an extension of our body”.