The innocence of childhood faces off against the strictures of adulthood in Director Astor Schiantarelli’s narrative music video for Luzparís’ La Invasión. DN invited Astor to take us through the inspirations and ever evolving developmental process behind this coerced coming of age story.
The story that I wanted to tell had something to do with the urge of exploring the emotional breakdowns that appear at an early age, and which apparently end up being the most transcending experiences of our lives. This, for me, is an invasion; and in this particular case: ‘The Invasion’. It is the confrontation of childhood against the world of adulthood, a confrontation that will never allow anyone to be the same again.
I aspired to create a world that would stand governed by its own rules. For this to happen, I centered on two elements. On one hand, we have the father figure, who reflects the strict norms of what one is and isn’t allowed to do. And on the other hand, we have the physical isolation which the story revolves around. When we watch the long-shot of the house, we realize they find themselves strayed away from other people. This was accomplished by working together with Production Designer, Marisa Ferreyra. We focused on using a traditional Belgian aesthetic. I come from a Belgian family, and all of its world always awakens a great interest inside of me. As a matter of fact, the house we see in the field, as well as its interiors are from a family with Belgian origins.
The story aspires to provoke more questions than answers.
In terms of the cinematography, I wanted to maintain a constant medium light level of intensity. Together with Ignacio Espinosa and Francisco Otero (DOP & Camera), we worked on transmitting a tenuous atmosphere that would emphasize the dramatic density of the story. This was reinforced during the color grading, adding film grain to obtain the texture we were looking for. We recorded with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera 4K with Canon lenses for the most part. For the slowmotion takes, we used the Sony FS5. Editing was done with Adobe Premiere and the grading with DaVinci Resolve.
At the moment of developing the story, the idea for opening the song was non-existent. It was an organic process that was reached as the project moved forward. Naturally, because of having a story with a particular narrative weight, the story demanded certain necessities to be told to its full potential. One of which was the necessity of opening the song in order to create moments with greater dramatic weight, where we could feel each shade of the characters as it was intended at the beginning of the video. This transforms the audiovisual piece into something else, into a fusion between a short film and a music video.
The band not only supported this idea, but also composed the additional music that we hear in the interlude. This interlude also compliments the sound design accomplished by Franco Lo Turco, bringing a greater sense of immersion to the viewer.
The last character to be introduced in the story was the woman. It was inspired by the phrase “for a child to be reborn, God makes his ray sleep”. The phrase belongs to the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, found in his poem A Mother’s Prayer (1858). I constantly read Mallarmé and when I remembered this poem I felt it had something to do with the story we were telling. By simply taking a phrase from it, and making it appear as a figure of a mother, we generated a certain focus of interest that awakens new questions regarding the drama experienced by the characters.
It was such an honor being able to witness the incredible acting performances of Pedro Benitez, Teo Melczarski Morcia, Jeremías Parrado y Mariana Vidal. I cannot thank them enough. Their performances were a unique source of creativity, which ended up giving realism to the story.
La Invasión aspires to provoke more questions than answers. One of these questions has to do with the woman eternally falling from the sky, which refers to the central question regarding the drama: Can the prayer of a mother stop the eternal return?
