U.S. HISPANIC
Rafa Arroyo, cinematographer: NFTs have helped me finance my projects
Maribel Ramos-Weiner| 15 de marzo de 2023
Rafa Arroyo Cinematografo
As a documentary director, Rafa Arroyo set himself a mission: to use his art to make visible feelings and situations that usually are not. That is what his documentary Trazos del Alma is about and that has just been nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the Goya Awards. The piece reflects the abuse that his mother suffered in her youth: “She could not express all that pain due to the stigmatization of society and she captured it in paintings,” he said in a new edition of Maye and Ríchard with the new talents. In the trailer for this short, his mother says it clearly: “It is very difficult to relive the past; even if you believe that the past is in the past and you erase it and forgive all those who have hurt you, the pain is always there.”
“I want to make invisible stories visible because these are people not capable of translating into words things they have felt, things they have perceived, but rather they do it by any other means available, for instance, art. So, right now, that is the job I have as a documentary filmmaker,” he highlighted.
He added that to reflect this with authenticity and recognition does not require expensive equipment. “I recorded my mother’s documentary with a camera and a €1,000 lens (…), if what you tell, you tell it from the heart, it already says a lot about you.”
Arroyo was born in Ciudad Real, a Spanish town loaded with Cervantine references, in particular, to Don Quixote, which seems to evoke his devotion to reflecting on lost battles. However, in his beginnings, he was far from there. He graduated and worked as a telecommunications engineer, but he said that when he was at his office he felt a void that he began to fill through photography.
His career as a cinematographer takes off with Trazos del Alma, which he embarked on in October 2020: “The most difficult project I’ve ever had on a personal level: portraying my mother’s scars. It has been a road paved with doubts; many doubts, and personal confrontations,” he said in a post on LinkedIn. The short was also selected at other international festivals such as Doc Edge and the Aguilar Film Festival.
Arroyo has also ventured into music, fashion, and advertising videos for clients such as Warner and Netflix, and has worked for well-known brands in Europe such as Carrefour and Palomo. He is convinced that with hard work, he can continue advancing in his projects, despite that the audiovisual sector is reserved for companies or producers with more experience. However, this has not stopped him and he has managed to have access to alternative financing methods, such as NFTs.
NATURALIST AND INTIMIST PHOTOGRAPHY
One of Arroyo’s particularities is his style as a cinematographer. “Most call me because they consider my photography very naturalistic, not artificial at all, that it looks very raw and very natural. Everything is made with little artifice and they like that”. He adds that it does this without losing the cinematographic perspective.
His technique is focused in the way he handles light. “In my photography, I always look for the location to have the best possible natural light so that this light, if there are deficiencies and so on, can be replicated with some reinforcement or with some device. Always trying to work depending on whether it is something warm, tungsten, or if it is something more natural, HMI.”
He also takes into account the actor’s work with his photographic style, trying to have as little light on the set as possible. “So that the actors feel that they are not on a set, but rather in a space that could be their house or some place they recognize, and with few tripods.”
FIRST MOVIE AND NFTS
That very particular style of Arroyo was what caught the attention of the Colombian creator Luis Vargas, who offered him the opportunity to make his first film as a cinematographer outside his country.
Vargas and Arroyo met in a collective of filmmakers who finance their projects through NFTs (non-fungible tokens), a financing channel that is helping filmmakers to carry out their projects.
“One of the financing ways that I sought for Trazos del Alma was through NFTs, digital art that is now a trend, like cryptocurrencies and so on. I was very interested in this digital art trading because there were several people in the world of cinema without access to financing and they were looking for different ways. I said to myself: ‘how nice, another way of financing is opening up for those that we cannot compete with large producers or that already have many awards,’” he said.
Arroyo has a section in Foundation, a marketplace for NFTs, where he showcases his digital collections that are sold to obtain resources. To achieve this, he contacted Jordan Bayne —an American director who is between the US and Spain—, who introduced him to a group of filmmakers who are making films without accessing financing markets but selling digital art.
Currently, Arroyo is working on another documentary, “looking for these stories that are, as always, invisible.” It is about people affected by mortgages, and for this, he contacted a Spanish non-profit organization that helps people in a vulnerable situation who are having problems with banks, and investment funds, and who are trying to take over their houses, according to the filmmaker. “I am documenting this with these affected people, trying to make their story visible, and the truth is that I was surprised because it is something that can happen to all of us and that I think society should know about.”
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