Bad Day was my last fiction effort during film school. It was written as a one hour movie, but time constraints made me rush and drop things during shooting and so I ended with a slower-paced, fifty minute picture. Almost year later I re-edited the whole thing as a slim thirty minute short, and that was that, a Bad Day I could live with. Here it is now, for your viewing pleasure.

Extra geek points to whoever points out the obscure Philip K. Dick reference (note to self: don't do it again). ···

Site improvements: Now you can comment on Found Objects, which have also gained permalinks — so 2003, ain't it? ···

During the last year of film school we had an optional project — to write a short film to be shot in a single day, according to a theme. The theme was: what if there was some sort of pill that made you smart? I took the opportunity to do an explicitly sci-fi short, Weltschmerz. I stole a lot from the Voigt-Kampf scenes in Blade Runner, with some Peter F. Hamilton thrown in. It was fun. It was shame we lost the lead actress a couple of days before the shoot (not many times I heard someone so devastated on the phone, it was not her fault) and, unable to postpone, had to make do with Isa, which we had cast in a minor role primarily for her looks. We had almost no time to reharse, but Isa took the role quite bravely and I'm so thankful... We may have taken twenty hours (we shot the whole thing in a single apartment, so we had to change decorations a few times), but we did shoot it in a single day.

Here's the whole 13-minute short. Enjoy. ···

My online video spree continues with Sometimes We're Happy, a short film I did during the third year at film school in which I have a go at magical realist weirdness and, unfortunately, at acting. I have quite a soft spot for 'Por Vezes Somos Felizes' and I still look at it as perhaps my most aesthetically appealing work, done before I started worrying about other things.

Such as: directing real actors.

A remake, anyone? ···

The Zero — the story of a dangerous number is a documentary I did during my second year at film school and I've come to consider my first real work as director, past the whole storefronts-at-night, harbour-industrial-fetish, defocused-screen (see below), timelapses-are-so-cool experimental video thing one does when clueless (along with bad horror, which I never did for some reason).

Anyway, as I prepare /media for a spring cleaning, I decided to put my oldest (i.e. ineligible for festivals, for sale, etc) works online, so now you can enjoy The Zero in its full sixteen minutes of glory. Enjoy. ···

It's out at last. I went to Lisbon for the avant-premiere of Corações Plásticos (to be translated as Plastic Hearts?), a short film by Sérgio Brás d'Almeida that marks my debut as Director of Photography For Real. Here are a few screen captures from the finished film:


Monica Calle and Carlos Malato make one odd couple.


Impending doom for Custodia Gallego's character.


Adelino Tavares as Bad Guy Facing Retribution.


Claudia Jardim and Gustavo Vargas pause their fighting for 40 millisseconds.

And since I managed to obtain more pictures of last year's shoot, here's another bit of film crew porn including yours truly:


Left to right: 2nd AC Juliane Ruper (impersonating Kenny from South Park), 1st AC Susana Gomes and me. ···