#Gondola400 - part 2
Production: Digitalmovie.it
photography & art direction: Matteo Mescalchin
production design: Andrea Mescalchin
Subject: Squero Dei Rossi
Partners: Lighttools.com - Chimeralighting.com
Location: Giudecca, Venezia, Italy.
Following up the first presentation of #Gondola400, this is a second part gallery showing the progress of the main image collection.
Consistently with projects goals, outlines and style, I worked on different construction phases like hand painting, restoration, and more on woodwork.
A Gondola's waiting for maintenance work at the shop.
For technical reasons, painting area must be pretty tight around the boat, making it quite difficult for lighting.
Each part of the Gondola is carefully hand painted with multi-pass coating.
Every light on my set follows my original DIQCCP approach. It's a lighting method I designed back-mapping a set of pre-envisioned images to create an optimized workflow. The DIQCCP acronym works like a check list. Each light is placed (as D stands for Direction), calibrated (for Intensity), modified (for Quality), graded (for Color), Contained (for Control) and assigned with a given visual work or effect (for Purpose).
This way I build accurate photographic contrast to the scene taking out the unknown and unwanted from my lighting design. Most importantly, having a method dramatically reduces the time needed to set up effective lighting.
Some 20 years old Gondola goes under reconstruction work.
During the construction work the Gondola is manually turned upside down. It's an incredible operation performed with outstanding skills and carefulness.
Roberto and Giacomo tie down the early structure of the hull to some metal frames anchored on the ground. This operation is crucial to the boat asymmetric balance.
One of the most incredible procedure in the hundreds-years-old process of handcrafting Gondolas is the manual handling of the boat that is carefully put upside down with remarkable skills. Ancient holes in the ground are tailored to fit the two ends when the boat is facing downward, allowing a comfortable position of the boat to be further developed but also keeping it mechanically 'trapped' into a given torsion force.
Roberto dei Rossi accurately checks the fine position.
All measurements and construction steps are handed down from generation to generation without any drawings or technical diagrams. It's all about 'living informations'.
The plank is heated up with fire and bent to properly fit the curved line of the rowing deck.
Roberto Dei Rossi carefully looks at the lines of the Gondola shaping it asymmetric and tailored on the gondoleer body weight and height.
On a different area of the boatyard, restoration work takes place quietly in the stillness of the timeless workshop.
During a break from work, my brother Andrea (production designer) and myself are sharing some printed previews of the early part of project.
Follow me here on behance or follow #gondola400 on Instagram for more on the project.
Thanks for watching!