About The Song
This song is not only really cool, but the video is pretty bad ass as well.
It reminds me a lot of the style of Manu Chao: the colors, the hoodie, the walking around, and even the guy’s voice.
It was a collaboration between the group Macaco and Juanlu “El Canijo” from the group Calima from the Album Ingravitto released May 22, 2006 under the label Mundo Zurdo/EMI Music Spain.
About the Video
The video was produced by the Spanish studio Struendo Filmakers (www.struendo.com).
Founded by Juan Pablo Enis and Javi Gesto, Struendo does commercials and a lot of music videos for top talent including Bebe, Miguel Bose, Dover, Alejandro Sanz, Amaral, Bunbury and La Oreja de Van Gogh.
A big portion of their featured work seems to be with EMI Music Spain, which makes me wonder how Javi Gesto and Juan Pablo Enis established their connection with the people at EMI Music Spain.
For this video, the credits for directing and post-production are for Trueno Naranja, which is the motion graphics division of Struendo but the actual work was done by Rafa Calleja and Sergio Sainz-Vidal (aka Aphro).
Rafa Calleja was in charge of directing, editing and post-production, while the art direction and graphics were done by Sergio Sainz-Vidal.
I was able to get in touch with Rafa Calleja, and I was very impressed what a great guy he is.
He had been working for a year with Struendo Filmakers as editor and junior motion designer when the opportunity to direct this video came up. Here’s what he has to say about the project:
“ I worked hard, and after a year working for [Struendo], I began to direct animation teams for music videos and commercials.
Struendo had already been doing some music videos for Macaco and I knew him personally already.
Macaco trusted the style and experience of Struendo’s owner and director Javier Gesto (aka Javi), and he trusted my skills and talent.
So as Macaco’s new album Ingravitto came out to the streets, he offered me the responsibility of art direction and post-production of Macaco’s 2nd music video: Con la mano levantá.
In this moment I decided to contact one of my favorites art directors and design artist Aphro (urbansapines.com), who is also a close and old friend of mine from my hometown in Spain: Santander.
We discussed the concept and Aphro started to do all the designs for the backgrounds and elements for animation of the video.
Macaco is a really opend minded guy and he liked Aphro´s art examples straight away.
Originally, Javier Gesto was going to direct the shooting but as he was busy with another project, he told me to take care of it, and as it was quite low budget, we built a green screen chroma in a room of the basement at Struendo’s office in Madrid.
Shooting in DV format at that time (Panasonic DVx 100), I shot separately some playbacks with Macaco’s acting and the musicians performances and also all the different people from different cultures that appear on the video.
It was a long process as we had to shoot them in a really small room, one after the other, and with just one camera.
We had also a “green running machine” to give the feeling of running and walking of Macaco that we see on the video.
After the shooting, Aphro flew to Madrid (he is based in Barcelona) and we started with the post-production.
It was just him and myself and I think it took us like 12 days to finish it, working with 2 Mac G4 towers of 2006.
Also Javier Gesto did like the last 45″ seconds as he came back from his other project.
I think we both have a special feeling towards this video as it was our first project working together with full freedom of direction.
We worked at Struendo’s office for those 12 days and some nights and have to say that we had a nice time and fun mixing the live action footage with the graphics.
It was a small production but it was selected as one of the 3 final music videos in the Spanish Music Academy Awards of 2006.
Ultimately, Struendo won first prize, but with another video also created by the tandem of Aphro and my self.
It was a music video for the song: Let Me Out from the spanish band Dover.
I think that was in this days where we thought about joining our experience to develop The touch (thetouch.es).
The name was created by Aphro, and after that we´ve been collaborating together in loads of projects from music videos to commercials and broadcast promos.
Last year we decided to move to Berlin, a city that we both loved with lot of visual and life inputs.
And now a days Aphro is really focused on his music band challenge Pulshar and i keep developing The touch by directing projects (the latest is a campaign for Save The Children) and working as a freelancer motion designer for German studios such as M-box ”
So there you have it. This is a pretty amazing story. This video marked a significant step for Rafa Calleja’s trajectory back in 2006.
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