Did your previous experience as a creative team at F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, Sao Paulo influence the making of this film celebrating 100 years of Leica? 

Yeah for sure. We are still good friends and it helps the process to run smoothly. No formalities, no nonsense and the works become very collaborative.

What was the original brief?

The idea was to represent iconic photography from the past 100 years. There was a draft text and a first batch of pictures. The concept was very straightforward but at the same time we had a lot of freedom to build the narrative and the visual approach.

So many seminal photographs – did you film them in chronological order or were they chosen more for their transition into the next frame?

We went through a lot of possibilities: grouping the photos by theme and creating a relation between the text and the image. In the end, we chose the ones we could shoot beautifully and allow us to establish connections between them – e.g. Vietcong being shot and the monk on fire in background. Or the astronaut and the Iwo Jima flag.

Were there any set ups that you left out of the final edit?

Yes. When the shots didn’t do the original pictures justice.

Was there a lot of pre-production planning, did you storyboard the film in detail?

A lot of pre-production, discussions, camera tests, ideas – at one point we believed we could have 100 pictures! – but no storyboard. We used the original photos as inspiration all the time.

What were the main challenges of making the film and how did you resolve them?

How to combine freedom in terms of camera gears with high quality image. Our concept demanded a constant and natural human movement for the camera work, that was not possible to achieve with a steady cam, so we decide to try something different and we didn’t know if it would work until the shoot day! Of course, the biggest challenge was to capture all the iconic pictures in a way that they would hold something true to the original and again do them justice.That was scary.

And did you take all the set-ups outside of the studio and into a location? 

We took the camera out of the studio and placed it into real life 😉

Anything else you’d like to share?

We shot it in Montevideo, Uruguay, with a wonderful crew. We used Alexa M, Movi 10  and Cooke Speed Panchro lenses.