We were lucky to catch up with Juan Carlos Zaldivar recently and have shared our conversation below.
Juan Carlos, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Innovation comes in all shapes, sizes and across all industries, so we’d love to hear about something you’ve done that you feel was particularly innovative.
As both, a filmmaker and an artist we enjoy our creative process tremendously. Our primary interest, however, is to ensure that our work has longevity and that it affects a positive impact in society. Our company, Phonograph Films LLC is an art & media production, post-production and exhibition company founded in NYC in 1986. We are now also in Miami Beach, Florida, Los Angeles, CA, and Buffalo, NY.
We are interested in building community and developing new, creative ways to use film and art. Our first feature documentary, “90 Miles” aired on PBS’ award-winning national broadcast show, POV. As a pioneer in this space, POV worked with us to create a robust educational campaign, including a series of educational tools such as lesson plans, study and discussion guides, bibliography, filmography and even an interactive 90 Miles web component. POV facilitated over 60 national community screenings and university panels across the US, which led to a six city tour of Germany and an additional broadcast on the The World Channel as well as educational representation by Frameline. During this experience I was approached by many filmmakers and non-profit organizations to either produce media or to consult on how they could best use media to promote their mission. What we found is that most organizations budget to produce an annual video that is often screened at their annual fundraising gala. The budget for these videos i often healthy but these videos tend to disappear on a shelf after their original purpose. During my consultations, it occurred to me that if we understood the company’s long term goals, we could produce media that could be used beyond the fundraising gala in various ways that would stretch the value of the company’s investment on such production.
Since then, Phonograph Films produces, edits, consults, creates strategies and produces educational materials and web tools, which allow our partners to maximize the impact of their work and their mission. We are versed in documentaries as well as fiction, hybrid, experimental/alternative media, visual and performance art, interactive media and new technologies. To this end, we also organize exhibitions and civic engagement events around films, art and media. We provide a personable, one-stop production and post-production service facility for independent filmmakers and artists, corporate clients, foundations and non-profit organizations.
Our collaborators and partners include (among others): ABC, PBS, IFC (Independent Film Channel), WE (Women’s Entertainment), RFK USA, World of Wonder, The Everglades Foundation, The Green Family Foundation, Sundance Institute, The Miami Light Project, The Knight Foundation, Miami Filmmakers Collective, Miami Dade Department of Cultural Affairs, Miami Light Project and many others.
Another notable innovation in our field happened in 1998, when our film “The Story of the Red Rose” premiered at the Sundance International Film Festival. That year we were invited to produce and direct the trailer for the festival, which plays in front of every film screening at the festival. Having been to many film festivals by then, we pitched the idea of producing a series of trailers that can be played at random so that the audience would not get numbed to the trailer. The creative team at Sundance agreed and the result was a smash success. The series of trailers created a buzz on their own and people set on a quest to buy more movie tickets to try and see all of them. They were written up by Variety magazine, a first for film festival trailers anywhere. The multi-trailer model went on to be emulated by many film festivals around the US during the following years and quickly became an international trend at film festivals all over the world.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Juan Carlos Zaldivar (aka Violenta Flores) are a Cuban-born, award-winning filmmaker and video artist exploring the fact that moving images are created by a series of optical illusions, and yet have become integral to how humans understand, validate, and even dare to create new realities.
Juan Carlos Zaldivar (he/they)
• completed both a BFA and a Masters of Fine Arts at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and currently serves as a tenure-track professor in the Media study Department of the College of Arts and Sciences at The State University of New York at Buffalo.
• participated in the 2019 class at La Biennale di Venezia College Cinema to develop a feature-length art film which has also received the support of the Sundance Writers Lab and Locarno Open Doors.
• Zaldivar’s company, Phonograph Films is also developing a cross-platform project that reframes how we are presently looking at dementia, which includes a limited series podcast, a documentary and a VR community screening tour with the support of The Warhol Foundation through Locust Projects in Miami, Oolite Arts, Latino Public Broadcasting and other grants.
• associate produced the theatrical feature doc “Buena Vista Social Club, Adios” 2017.
• co-produced the VR film “A history of Cuban dance”, Sundance & SXSW 2016.
• co-directed the VR doc entitled “SwampScapes” with Elizabeth Miller and Kim Grinfeder in 2018.
• started a film career as a sound editor and designer, and worked on the Academy Nominated films such as “Sense and Sensibility”, “On the Ropes,” and on HBO’s America Undercover, which garnered an Emmy nomination for Best Sound.
• has had video artworks screened at many festivals worldwide and broadcast on PBS, ABC, IFC, Showtime, and WE.
• received numerous grants and awards.
• has served as a Juror for several major film festivals including the Sundance International Film Festival.
• was thrilled to work with Doc Society (previously Britdoc Foundation) as the Outreach Director for their first PanAmerican event, Good Pitch Miami 2017
https://goodprtch.org/events/gpmia2017
• directing credits include “90 Miles” (PBS), “The Story of the Red Rose” (Showtime), “Palingenesis” and “Soldiers Pay'” (IFC).
Artist Statement
Human relationship to physicality is at the core of our work. So are the impermanence, transmutations and transcendences of the physical. I/We apply these concepts to objects, to places and to our own body. The principle of adaptation is also present in our work as it applies to natural survival, as well as human migrations.
What is a video/film? Like humans, moving images mostly depend on a physical apparatus (a body) in order to be seen, and just like human bodies these technologies age and perish. We find it fascinating that even though moving images are created by a series of optical illusions, they are widely accepted as “truthful” in our cultures; so much so, that moving images are often equated with human memories and have become integral to how humans understand, validate, and even create new realities. These values represent a double-edged sword because new technologies are becoming so sophisticated that humans are beginning to confuse what is actual or “real” with various types of refined artificial constructions.
We are interested in the relationship between natural and artificial constructions because these exchanges always trigger larger questions about our humanity, and because a dialogue between these two elements often spins other dialogues regarding identity, history, transculturalism, power and acceptance.
As humans continue to colonize the earth, more and more species will go extinct and many of our physical exchanges with them will disappear, possibly to never to be recovered in their original form. Some of our projects meditate on the boundless possibilities –as well as the limitations– of digital preservation and on the ultimately impossible reconciliation between the limits of human physicality and the uncontainable forces of nature. We are primarily interested in creating audience interactions with media to ensure maximum emotional and intellectual impact.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice
We recently received a grant to explore the NFT space. We are excited by the opportunity that NFTs offer artists to participate in the life of their projects beyond its initial acquisition by a collecting entity. This is historically unprecedented and it opens a series of important opportunities for artists to be active, financial participants in their own careers. NFTs collecting and boolean curve incentives also provide a magnificent tool for collectors to work together to elevate an artist in a win-win situation.
The challenges in the NFT world is the lack of accessibility to the mainframe networks (Etherium ETH, Bitcoin BIT, etc) without a certain level of programming skills, which many artists lack. As a result, many artists are still forced to go through a minting service or market place, which makes them vulnerable to proxy misuse, requirements to use volatile tokens and other risky walls.
Our conclusion was that the best solution for artists is to find a way to create their own minters and to mint directly to a network without the creation or use of a token because, in fact, NFTs are tokens themselves. Int he speculative future market that is currently banking on the value of a specific token, minting NFTs directly to the blockchain and delivering NFT tokens to collectors directly from the artist’s wallet is the most secure way to protect all assets involved.
As a product of the grant we created our own NFT storefront with the most reliable proxy we found called Artiva. We launched a limited edition NFT in our own space FlamingPhosphor.space Our storefront also included the ability to create additional storefronts that we could make available to other artists or to curate NFT exhibitions that would be for sale while charging a small percentage of first-time sales. Recently, however, Artiva disappeared, seemingly being acquired by Zora. While we have experienced the disappearance of our original storefront for the time being, our NFT assets are still safe and under our control in our Etherscan dashboard and we retained the ability to make our NFTs available on the Zora marketplace.
Conclusion: while this is an exciting space, artists should beware of market places whose smart contracts include paying royalties in a token other than the original blockchain currency used to min the NFTs. Without some programming training and/or the aide of an experienced blockchain programmer, artists should also beware of solutions that require them to go through a proxy to conduct business on the blockchain because often these marketplaces are looking for saturation of market participation with the real goal of selling the platform based on the number of users. In the event of such mergers/acquisitions/sales, protecting or defending the interest of the users is often not a priority for those platforms.
Our series is selling well and its value has held-up through all the fluctuations of the blockchain space in the last year, in fact it has tripled in price. We have sold 6 of the 22 NFT’s in the series. You can view or purchase one for yourself here: https://zora.co/0x2f0A8C8b28eD17c9966968cFe571177bb5E57c6a
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
We want to create and work on projects that have a positive impact in the world.
Contact Info:
- Website: Zaldivar.info
- Instagram: phonographfilms
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/juancarlos.zaldivar/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juancarloszaldivar/
- Twitter: flamingphosphor
- Youtube: phonographfilms
- Other: @ViolentaFlores (Instagram) ViolentaFlores.com
Image Credits
All images property of Phonograph Films LLC. All rights reserved.