The subscription costs $ 4.99 per month (premiere price). The investment reaches close to half a million dollars.
Pop Up Cinema is the first national platform of streaming subscription cinema which produces original content, and which was presented on the night of Friday, December 3, at the MAAC Cine. It is not only a producer, but a distributor and exhibitor, with its own application for mobile devices, website, that make it possible to browse and play content on smart TVs.
You can download Pop Up Cinema in the Android Play Store, in the Apple App Store, or in PopUpCinema.ec. Since December 4, it has been active for Ecuador, Latin America, the United States and Europe.
Ricardo Velasteguí, one of the founding partners, explains that the idea was born in the pandemic, in the midst of the uncertainty of what would happen to the theater, which was its strength. They asked them for digital content. Why not save the works and upload them? “I had a lot of resistance to that because I felt like we weren’t ready. A lot of actors tried Zoom, with good and bad experiences, but I didn’t want to risk that. “
Instead, they thought of a kind of theatrical Netflix. “But Netflix sets the bar very high for us, and that is why we rush to make our platform the closest thing” to that experience of streaming, and to adapt the format from theater to film.
“It is not recorded theater. It is the theatrical script transformed into the cinematographic format”. What we will see in this first stage will be short shorts based on the plays that worked in Pop Up Teatro, in addition to series, documentaries, movies.
Alberto pablo rivera (New Rock Cinema), another of the partners, joins this project because of his love of acting. “We are never going to give it up, but we also have other goals. Ricardo has been directing theater, I cinema, and we have merged the experience of both (Velasteguí with the acting work, Rivera with the cinematography); and we are going to continue filming to feed the site ”.
Velasteguí expresses that the selection of content has been an intuitive process, comedy, drama, blind theater, black and white. “Each one has its aesthetics, its language, its style, its plot”, techniques and colors.
The acting team is the same as the Pop Up Theater stages, who have seen their work embodied “forever,” says Rivera. It has been two years of pre-production and production. “Nobody was going to imagine that he was going to go from theater to cinema (and to streaming) ”, Complements Velasteguí. We expanded a lot in the silences and pauses, we cut a lot of text, acting was incredible ”.
Pop Up Cinema has also become the first company to pay annual royalties to actors (through Uniarte, the Society for the Management of Intellectual Property Rights of Authors and Performers). They will also pay royalties to musicians through Sayce. There are no commercials or ‘ads’ within the platform. Advertising will be integrated through product placement, within the original content.
The shortest film lasts 15 minutes, and the longest lasts two hours. It is the freedom of one’s own platform, which is not governed by traditional film or television formats. Each piece lasts what it should be. That flexibility fascinates creators.
Another thing that fills them with fascination is being able to tell any story, for example, Patient zero (the account of the first case of COVID-19 in Ecuador). This possibility of being able to tell local stories in a short time is what mentalizers consider metarrealidad, bring real and close experiences to the field of fiction.
Finally, they express, they want give the public Ecuadorian identity. “We really don’t have that many options with our stories, our accents, our people, our locations,” and all the forms of culture reflected in it. streaming, contribute the two partners, who remember the general emotion among Ecuadorian viewers of the series Cobra Kai (Netflix) for the few seconds in which the series mentions that one of the families comes from Ecuador, and they imagine what it would be like to turn the identification of those four seconds into a forty-minute experience. (AND)
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