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Your shortfilm AKASHA seems a very hard work from you and your team, how long have you been preparing it and how many people worked on it?
Well, we started all the way back in 2014. That’s when we had the idea to make a dance film about the four elements, set in a sort of fantastic universe free of time and place. We wanted to experiment with different dance styles, different lighting and camera techniques and different locations.
We weren’t able to finance such a film out of our own pockets, so we shot the first element as a proof of concept and then did a small crowd funding campaign. We then went on to shoot the other three elements one by one until early 2017. We finished editing AKASHA in May 2017.
On our shoots we were something between 5 and 10 people but each element posed very different problems, so our team was very different each time. All in all we were about 25 people working on the film from drone pilots to scuba divers.
Can you present me quickly your key cast? (Jelena Pfister, Simon Progin, Annina Biesold, Nadir Josi)
I think something special about AKASHA is its diverse cast. We interpreted dance more broadly than just this or that dance style. In fact we only have two actual dancers in our cast: Jelena Pfister (Earth) and Nadir Josi (Fire) are professional dancers and dance teachers from Switzerland. Simon Progin (Air) is a trampolinist in the Swiss Olympic team. He jumps as high as 9 meters for his incredible twists and turns. Annina Biesold (Water) is a synchronized swimmer. We chose to work with her, because performing underwater poses a range of problems such as cool temperatures, continuously holding your breath, being upside down and orientating yourself underwater without goggles, which all sounds much easier than it actually is.
<-- Watch here the teaser (air)
<-- Aquí puedes ver una muestra (aire)