Director Gonçalo Almeida and editor Ricardo Saraiva met at the London Film School and have been collaborating ever since. For their award-winning short Atom and Void, they used Louper to livestream their remote edit sessions between Portugal and London.

Gonçalo, you’ve been working with Ricardo as your editor for a number of years. Why do you think this creative collaboration has been so successful?

Gonçalo Almeida: Ricardo and I were in the same class at film school. We both speak Portuguese - he’s from Brazil and I’m from Portugal, and we got along from the beginning. I like the fact that we are very different: I watch mainly horror films and he works mostly with drama and arthouse cinema from around the world. So he looks at my films from this angle - it's very nice to have both approaches. He cares a lot about the story, and he’s not a man of a lot of words. There are moments where we don't exactly agree, but he's very patient, he’s super calm. And I'm a bit more intense, I would say. And I think that’s why the relationship works.

With Atom and Void, I loved how you created empathy and connection with a creature that we're not normally sympathetic toward.

Ricardo Saraiva: Everything in that film is real, it’s a real spider. And even though the film is only seven minutes long, they shot for 18 days, just because they had to get that spider to go in the right direction and take the pauses they needed to take. We tried to portray that spider as if it were a human character, to imbue it with emotion, with feelings, as much as we could. It’s all about audience empathy, it's all about the eyes. Even though the spider has so many eyes, you somehow connect with each one of them.

I showed it to my daughter, she's three years old and I thought she might be a bit scared, but she was completely drawn into it. She was still asking me questions about the spider weeks later. 

GA: It makes me really happy that your child related to it emotionally because I try to keep things simple, with images that don't create distance from the audience. And most of my short films don't have a lot of words, I like to see what people from different geographies understand. I've always been interested in looking at other beings, not only humans. It's been present in most of my films.

Where did the idea for this story come from?

GA: I was listening to a podcast about the ‘Phantom Cosmonaut Theory’. It says that in the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, people were sent up to space, but because the missions failed, they were erased from history so the Soviet Union wouldn't have to declare these failures. I felt there could be these very lonely cosmonauts drifting somewhere in space, since the 50s or 60s. Another thing I learned is that the Soviet Union would send many different animals to space - a turtle, some fruit flies, a spider, strange things like that. I thought, what if there is this spider, for instance, that lives inside a dead astronaut? Wouldn’t that be an interesting thing?

How were you able to get a performance out of the spider?

GA: I started talking to a biologist, a spider specialist, and he told me how spiders sense the world. Some species see better than us, others don't see much. The species we worked with was Tegenaria domestica, the common house spider. They don't see very well, he told me if you'd like them to move, you can try and use a straw and blow a bit behind them, they’ll move away from the wind. They sense the world with their paws, because they have to feel vibration in the web to catch prey.

What was interesting is that after one or two takes, they learn a certain path and then they will always go that way. So if it's the right path, great! If it's wrong, you have to change the set, because there's no way they will change - once they learn a way to hide or to go, they’ll just keep going that way, you know? So we learned to make the path as obvious as possible.

If you get into this adventure, you have to be ready to wait and be patient, you cannot force it. At some points there was desperation because nothing would happen! But there's a reason why we are not doing this with AI or animation. It's because we are interested in looking. So we have to watch, and you will get some surprises, accidents, like “look at what she did, this is great!”. And you look at each other and like, man, this is so exciting. I found it very rewarding.

Teaser for the film

There was that amazing moment where she looks at the eggs, she gives that little pause, and reaches out to touch the nest. You can’t help but feel something in that moment. 

GA: Yes, we didn't expect that at all. But once she did it, she did it again and again, which was great for us! I now know why she reaches out to touch the egg sac: it’s because there is an obstruction there. I don't think she sees the eggs, but she has to feel what it is, you know. And that's why she uses her paw - to understand.

Ricardo, at what point did you come on board?

RS: Gonçalo and the DP, Alex Grigoras, were locked in this studio that they had in Portugal, just working together for ages, building the set and shooting. They had a lot of footage, and Gonçalo started assembling the film himself, just picking up the best takes. And then he reached out to me and sent me the project. I started cutting, tweaking the edit that he had done. And then we jumped on Louper. It was the first time I’d used Louper, and we were exchanging cuts, working together, the whole experience. Gonçalo really embraced cutting the film like this.

GA: We had the luxury of shooting chronologically, in parts. So Ricardo would see it and then let us know if something was missing. Ricardo might say, “I think you need a point-of-view shot”, so when we went back for the next stage of shooting, we shot the things we were missing. It made the editing process very easy, because we were editing all the time: in the storyboard, during the shoot, we kept refining it.

What was your experience working remotely on Louper?

GA: Ricardo has gotten busier and busier because he works on a lot of projects, and our relationship has evolved to talking online and using Louper, instead of me going to London, where he's based. We don’t need to wait for two whole weeks where we are both completely free, we can find time to do a bit here and a bit there.

I also use Louper with my cinematographer, Alex, who is the colorist on my projects. It saved me a lot of time traveling. If you’re in a big city, meeting every day, you waste hours commuting. I don't have that time, they don't have that time. So for me, it's been magical.

The sound design was very subtle and effective, can you talk about creating the sound of the spider?

GA: That was a challenge because we obviously didn't record any sound on the set. The most interesting thing was that spiders have eight legs, so when you do foley for them walking, if you do the sound for all the legs, it's too much. So we just focused on the legs that people are looking at. Then the rest of the soundscape was more like a spaceship feeling - I recorded a couple of spaces that have reverberation and did some in post-production as well. 

RS: I usually don't use a score much in the first part of the edit, because I think the film has to work on its own. But in this case, without it, it was hard to tell whether the film was working or not. There's no dialogue, there's nothing else. So we really needed to get the atmosphere right.

GS: I felt that it needed a human element, to bridge this empathy between us and this animal that most of the people are afraid of, so I thought a human voice will be interesting. I started making some tests with synthesized human voices, and when I met with the composer, Andre, he wrote the music and recorded with a real choir. And I think it worked - it has this emotion that otherwise doesn't exist in the movie. We had to use the tricks of classic cinema in our favor and be very simple, I think.

The film has been really well received at Festivals. Can you talk about the reception it’s had?

RS: I speak to Gonçalo and every week he's traveling - to Switzerland, to Japan, just to pick up an award! So the film is doing quite well, I think because of the incredible achievement they've done on set.

GA: The film has been making its festival circuit, mostly through genre film festivals, some of which I have attended before with my previous films. Sitges was a festival I had wanted to go to for a long time. The other big surprise was Short Shorts in Japan, where the film won the J-wave award. It was my first time in Japan, and it was an amazing experience.

In your opinion, what is it about the story, or the film itself, that has resonated with audiences across the world?

I think there is an interest in things that are made with time, passion, care, and with our own hands. I see a lot of people disenchanted with the AI phenomenon, so they might look at a film like Atom & Void as a form of artistic resistance. I think some of the interest in the film comes from that, from the way it was made. I didn't intentionally make a banner out of that; I would want the story to be interesting even if the film was an animation. I didn't want the technique to stand out. 

There were times when there was a clear emotional reaction in the parts of the film that we intended to create those reactions. In one festival, the audience was laughing in the most emotional moment. I didn't expect that, so it was interesting as well.

I love the short film format. I don't think it's a minor format or a stepping stone to do feature films. I just really like it. Just as writers sometimes write poems or short stories as well as novels, so I try to write these short films. I'm not a writer, but I write with images: short films are my version of that.

Gonçalo Almeida is a writer and film director based in Portugal. Check out his site to view his films, including the trailer to Atom and Void.

Ricardo Saraiva BFE is a film editor based in London. You can view his portfolio on his website.

Alex Grigoras was the DP on Atom and Void. You can watch his recent work here.  Alex shot on the Blackmagic Cinema 4k Micro, using the Laowa 24mm 2x Periprobe Macro lens, and the Laowa 25mm 2.5-5X Ultra Macro.

André Carvalho recorded original music for the film. View the live recording session here, and his other film scores on his site.

Ricardo and Gonçalo used Louper to stream their remote edit reviews, with Alex and Gonçalo using Louper for their color grading sessions. Check out our livestreaming setup guides for Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

All film stills from Atom and Void.