Expo Pantalla 2020: ASC Members Join Online Events

The online Expo Pantalla takes place August 18-20, offering three opportunities to participate with Society members via Zoom, including Fernando Argüelles, Gonzalo Amat and Checco Varese. 

All discussions will be conducted in Spanish.

AUGUST 18, 3:00PM CT
ASC Presenta: Preproduccion, Producción y Postproduction PARTE I 
Cómo las tres partes del proceso son igualmente importantes y están inter relacionadas en la corrección de colores y resultado final. Enfasis en series de tv.
Moderador: Fernando Argüelles ASC, AEC; con Gonzalo Amat, ASC y Juan Ignacio Cabrera colorist y propietario de Lightbender en Santa Monica, California.

AUGUST 19, 4:00PM CT
ASC Presenta: Preproduccion, Producción y Postproduction PARTE II
Incluye parte del día anterior añadiendo: streaming services, new media, colorimetria, LUT, ACEs,  espacio de colores y HDR.
Moderador: Fernando Argüelles, ASC, AEC; con Gonzalo Amat, ASC y Juan Ignacio Cabrera colorist y propietario de Lightbender en Santa Monica, California.

AUGUST 20, 4:00PM CT
ASC Presenta: ASC Directores de Fotografía Hispanos en Hollywood, (comienzos, experiencia y trayectoria profesional internacional).
Experiencia y trayectoria profesional. Fotógrafos internacionales.
Moderador: Fernando Argüelles, ASC, AEC; con Checco Varese, ASC y Gonzalo Amat, ASC.

Aquí encontrará los detalles completos del registro y la programación del evento. Todas las discusiones se llevarán a cabo en español.

Fernando Argüelles, ASC, AEC was born in the Asturias region of Spain and moved to Madrid at a young age to pursue a career in film. While there, he co-founded the production company Los Films del Oasis (Oasis Films), which produced numerous films, including Best Seller — his first feature.

Argüelles graduated from Centro de Instruccion Comercial e Industrial with a specialty in image and sound and also attended the University of Image Sciences and Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and attended the American Film Institute to study cinematography.

During his time at AFI, Argüelles received the Joseph and Olga Auerbach Scholarship for European students with exceptional abilities and was selected as one of the cinematographers to shoot a half-hour featurette.

Following his graduation and shooting several films, Argüelles moved into television. His body of work consists of television series, miniseries and movies of the week, and his credits include Prison Break, Grimm, Hemlock Grove, Second Chance, Scorpion andSwamp Thing. He has worked for Netflix, USA, A&E, Fox, CBS, CW and ABC, among others. 

In addition to his ASC membership, Argüelles is a member of the Spanish Society of Cinematographers (AEC), associate member of the Society of Camera Operators (SOC) and member of the Actors Fund. Argüelles has served as a judge for the LA Emmy Awards Spanish-language programs and was a blue-ribbon panelist for the Emmy Awards — hosted by the Cinematography Peer Group — as well as a panelist for the Television Academy Cinematography Internship Program.

Gonzalo Amat, ASC was born in Mexico to parents who were Spanish immigrants. Growing up between Mexico and Spain, the young man was fueled by two great passions: still photography and reading. Amat’s father spent a great deal of time when he was young in a cinema owned by his own father in rural Spain, and therefore, a love of film was instilled in Amat at a young age. But it was right before he entered college, he says, that a teacher first gave him a copy of American Cinematographer — which was at the time hard to come by in Mexico City — and told the young man that he could combine his two passions in film.  

“I wasn’t sure how to, so I worked a bit on set and saw that the cinematographer was really the gatekeeper and the person in charge of executing the film language of each setup. So I knew then that I had to become one,” he says.

Amat attended Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, where he studied fine art photography. After graduation, he worked as a producer for companies including HBO Ole. But a continued pull toward cinematography brought him to London to study at the London Film School. Most of his classmates wanted to direct, he says, which allowed him to shoot more than 20 short films and documentaries. 

Subsequently, he was accepted into the American Film Institute, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in cinematography. His thesis film, Fueling the Fire, was accepted into more than 40 festivals, and won awards in 15.

His early work includes the features 7 Días and El Estudiante — both of which earned him best cinematography nominations at the Gabriel Figueroa Awards — as well as The Devil Inside. His other feature work includes Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones and Carrie Pilby.

His television work includes Believe — created by Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Friedman — as well as Person of Interest, SEAL Team, Happy! and Outer Banks. For his work in the Amazon Studios sci-fi alternate-history drama The Man in the High Castle, Amat was nominated for two ASC Awards as well as an Emmy Award.

Born in Peru, Checco Varese, ASC got his start as a news cameraman before moving into music videos, commercials, television and features. 

Starting in the mid-1980s, he spent nearly a decade shooting news coverage and documentaries in major zones of conflict: Latin America (Chiapas Uprising, Salvador and Nicaragua Wars, Panama Invasion, Colombia Drug War, Shining Path, Chile's Military Junta); The Caribbean (Haiti Crisis); Europe (Bosnia Crisis, Chechnya Crisis); the Middle East (Gulf War, West Bank and Gaza Strip Crisis) and Africa (South African Riots and the Rwanda Crisis).

In the mid-1990s, Varese established himself as a leading director of photography, shooting hundreds of music videos, including Dave Matthew's Band's “Crash” and Prince’s “Black Sweat,” for which he was nominated for Best Cinematography at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards.

His notable narrative credits include the television projects Reign, True Blood, Fidel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Proven Innocent and the pilot for Jane the Novela.

His feature work includes El Aura, 5 Days of War, Prom Night (2008), Miracles From Heaven, The 33 and It: Chapter Two.

Juan Ignacio Cabrera started his career in Madrid, Spain, 24 years ago, working as a Visual Effects Supervisor & Animator on everything from commercials, to music videos, to feature films. After 10 years in the VFX industry, he evolved his career towards color and finishing, working in companies like El Ranchito, Molinare Madrid and Infinia. His background in visual effects helped him immensely on the technical side of color grading and color science, and he often blends both worlds when needed. 

Since moving to Los Angeles in 2011, he has worked as colorist and stereographer on projects including Prometheus; The Amazing Spiderman; Star Trek: Into Darkness; Transformers: Age of Extinction; and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (for which he won two AIS Awards). On the television side, he has worked on shows including StartUp (Sony), Quantum Break (Microsoft), and, more recently, The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, for TNT (Paramount Television Studios) 

His mixed background allowed him to jump very early into new technologies such as ACES, stereography, HDR and HFR, among others, and incorporate ideas from all of them into more standard workflows. He is a firm believer in “postproduction starts in pre-production” and enjoys developing new workflows or optimizing existing ones for projects that might present new challenges, like flexible color re-conform, large VFX assets handling, multiple color versioning, multiple-format and multiple-aspect ratio deliverables.  

In 2014, Cabrera founded his own company in Santa Monica, LightBender, to provide color and mastering services, as well as custom workflows for challenging productions, and research of special processes for postproduction and digital cinematography.