The True Story Behind ¡Viva La Evolución!
The greatest stories are true — and stranger than fiction. As I publish ¡Viva La Evolución!, I’d like to finally publicly share the story behind the documentary that launched my VR career. The story — like the documentary — is a tale of global camaraderie and insane luck.
But first, a little about the documentary:
You’re in a cramped loft in Havana, Cuba. The sun streams through a window overlooking a market, and the sounds filter in softly from outside: chickens clucking, people bartering. Inside, it’s a makeshift recording studio complete with turntables, mixers and crates of vintage dance vinyls. Your journey into Cuba’s electronic music underground — a creative retaliation against this country’s isolationism — begins here.
You are soon joined by the godfather of Cuban electronic music, Joyvan Guevara. Guevara keeps the spirit of free parties alive in Cuba, and he has a massive rave planned for tonight. There, you’ll dance ’til dawn as you experience the incredible story of a people perched on the brink of a global culture and the artists leading their way.
If you haven’t seen Viva yet, please watch it in headset at on Facebook 360, Littlstar, Samsung VR, VeeR, YouTube 360 or Oculus Video.
Havana, Cuba 2015
I moved to Havana in 2015 for a documentary journalism program in conjunction with NYU. I didn’t know any Spanish, but I was loving it. It lacked many of the comforts of home- wifi, hot sauce -but there was one thing I couldn’t forget — electronic music.
I asked a friend at the art institute Claudia — a gorgeous lady with tiny lizards tattooed all over her, whether there was anywhere I could go to listen to house and techno. She smiled and said that her favorite DJ lived right around the corner from me.
She took me to visit Joyvan Guevara in his tiny apartment stuffed with vinyls later that day and helped us translate our conversation. We immediately clicked — we believed in the underground, in the unifying power of this music to bring together people from vastly different backgrounds. He had thrown a party for 15,000 people on a beach outside Havana for free. I knew I had to make my documentary on his life.
We became fast friends. On my birthday, he called me and told me to come outside my house. He had set up a speaker system in the street and we danced and played dominoes until the cops shut us down.
He taught me that to be a great artist has nothing to do with mass appeal or critical acclaim, but sharing an intense feeling of understanding and bringing people together.
San Francisco, CA March 2016
I had graduated early and moved back to the Bay Area — happily falling into the VR community. Attending 360 meetups, I heard a lot of things that reminded me of early misconceptions about filmmaking: you can’t cut quickly or it will disorient the viewer, don’t move the camera or the viewer will get sick. I thought all of this could work if it was done well. It was time to make a full doc that showed my vision of immersive.
Moreover, I wanted to give a platform for Cubans to tell their own stories. In the wake of the lifting of the travel restrictions, American press was crating a lot of news about the “Cuban experience” which I knew was not terribly authentic. Electronic music provides an excellent lens through which to look at the topic of globalization and local culture. I knew what story I had to tell.
Miracle One…
Not a week later, I read an ad on Craigslist: “Do you want to make a movie?” I did. I wrote to the anonymous lister, describing my wild flight of fancy: I wanted to produce a VR documentary on Cuba’s underground electronic music scene and what the lifting of the embargo and subsequent influx of American culture meant for this culture.
The next day I received a phone call from a former Hollywood executive, asking me to meet him at the Hayward Jet Center. I drove up in my Prius as he landed his plane. He said he was interested in Virtual Reality and would fund this project as an experiment. He gave me just enough money to cover simple equipment and plane tickets back to my second home.
I wasn’t really sure how I was going to do this by myself on the allocated budget. Frankly, I was pretty scared. Fortunately, my angelic best friend Ariella said she was down for an adventure and wanted to help me.
Miracle Two…
I was attending SVVR trying to figure out a good strategy. I ended up at a talk by the heads of VR Playhouse. Ian Forester was waxing philosophically about the nature of perception. I brought up psychedelic theory. Instant homies. He asked me what I did and I told him I was going to Cuba to shoot a rave doc. He immediately said, “I’m coming with you”.
I was blown away and pretty much didn’t believe him. But sure enough, he confirmed just a few weeks later and we met for a second time at the airport in Havana.
Havana, Cuba May 2016
Unfortunately, Ian had not accounted for Cuban customs. The two Odyssey rigs Google had graciously loaned him for the project, along with a custom A7 rig, were immediately seized as suspicious cargo. Our Cuban fixer tried to explain, to no avail. After 3 hours, we left the airport, sans cameras.
The following week, we traveled all around Havana, including to a strange Google partnership space - trying to find someone who could help us navigate the bureaucracy to get the cameras out in time to shoot. This showed us a very different side of Havana, but was fruitless in retrieving the gear.
I said we had to push ahead with the cameras I had brought. Production had to begin. However, because the PixPros I had were so poor in low light and we were shooting in a castle with no lights at night, we were going to have to get creative.
Miracle Three…
Joyvan said he knew a man who ran a huge audio visual company, but we’d need to convince him since we didn’t have any money. I only met him for a minute and put a headset on him, showing him a party I had shot in San Francisco. He agreed to provide us with all the audio visual for free. Wrap around LED walls to light the entire building with any visuals we wanted. We were in business.
The Day of the Rave
We worked tirelessly to get the venue ready for the event all day. The castle was full of what seemed to be old construction debris — wood with old nails jutting out of it. We cleared it all by hand. Next the LED panels went in and finally the speaker system.
As the sun began to set, people began mingling outside La Chorrera. Joyvan played a sunset session and his friend spun fire near the water. DJs from Germany and the US had flown in to play the party as well. It was a true international gathering to celebrate this international art form. The party heated up and later, we moved upstairs to the LED lit dance floor.
But around midnight, all the power suddenly shut off. My heart sank. How were we going to get the footage we needed? We didn’t have nearly enough. I had imagined this going to the dawn, like any truly epic party. The revelers filed outside, but still seemed determined to party. Then suddenly, the power turned back on. Fate was on our side. This actually turned out to be a great moment in the doc and as Joyvan puts it, “If the power doesn’t go out, it means it’s not a great party.”
As the sun rose over the Malecon sea wall, Joyvan and his friends sat and joked around, reminiscing on all the parties they had been through together and what the future would hold between our two countries.
There is No Fourth Wall, a post script
Before we left, I wanted to host a little gathering back at my old stomping ground at Ludwig to show people what this technology actually was. I believe we held the first VR film festival in Havana, though it was rather casual. We showed examples of awesome 360 work as well as photogrammetry.
Pedro described seeing VR for the first time in a subsequent interview with WLRN. “It was like traveling to another dimension,” he said. “making wider the access to have better opportunities as filmmakers, as artists.”
The rest of that summer I slaved for 16 hour days working on Viva at the VR Playhouse studio in LA. They helped me immensely, making the PixPro footage absurdly lush and vivid. I stayed in headset, trying to find the grammar for the world I had captured.
I remember the rush I got on August 12th at 6am as I put the last subtitles on Viva and watched the sun rise on a beach in Cuba as the sky over Los Angeles turned pink. I had pulled it off.
Post Script
Viva screened at Cannes NEXT, The World VR Forum, Raindance, and several other festivals.
Looking back, Viva brought me the greatest night of my life, a visionary mentor, the chance to show my work globally and many, many new friends. It seemed like a crazy dream, but chasing it changed my life. If you feel like you have a story that needs to be told, I can only encourage you to keep on pushing. The pieces will fall into place and you will be left with so much more than you dreamed for.
