The weather first
Before anything is drawn we agree on the light: its hour, its direction, what it has just come through. Everything downstream is an argument with that one decision.
About / 01
A studio of nine people working in the gap between a photograph and the memory of one. We build the place first and light it afterwards.
Est. 2016LisbonNine worlds and counting
Every world we have made started as a piece of weather. Not a character, not a plot, not a brief with a deadline attached to it, but a specific quality of light falling on something we had not built yet. The rest is the long, unglamorous business of finding out what that light is falling on.
We work in a single room with the blinds half down. Nine of us, most days. The wall at the back has held the same nine frames for two years and they change slowly, the way a coastline changes. When one comes down it is because somewhere in it the light stopped being true, and no amount of craft will argue a viewer out of noticing that.
What we sell, if the word has to be used, is the pause before someone speaks. The half second where they are still inside the frame and have not yet decided what to say about it.
A door is only interesting if you believe in the room.
Studio note, pinned above the light desk since the first winter
Which is why we spend most of a project on the things a viewer will never consciously look at. The temperature of the shadow under an arch. Whether the mist is moving with the water or against it. Nobody names these. Everybody feels them, and they are the entire reason a made place either holds a person or quietly lets them go.
Method / 02Three habits, held longer than they were comfortable.
Build it, then find the frame
The place gets made whole, including the parts nobody will see. Then we walk around inside it until a composition stops us. Framing is discovery, never a layout exercise.
Take away until it aches
The last week of any project is subtraction. Elements come out one at a time and stay out unless the image visibly misses them. Most of them do not.
Coda / 03
Nine of them are finished. The tenth is currently a colour and a time of day.
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