The idea for Children of Kings came in 2009 while researching for historical material I needed for another concept I was working on. The story of Juana Azurduy and her family in Bolivia fascinated me and I started writing the Screenplay straight away.
Of course, money was always an issue. Money from production companies is not easy to get and though public funding for movie projects in Germany is strong, my lack of experience proved to be a tricky hurdle. I then began to work on the idea of developing the trailer to promote this concept and make it more interesting and compelling to potential financers.
Since I had the vision of how the trailer should look like, what I needed was a strong team to help me transform this vision. Berlin does offer quite a few platforms where film professionals can get together, so I joined a few of these platforms and began recruiting people.
Although I could not offer payment, they liked the concept and were keen to join this project. Slowly the production team began to grow. My mother was pretty much the first crewmember. She is a fashion designer, so everything that you can see that people are wearing in our teaser, was designed and made by her, using the internet and a couple of other sources as guidelines. When the recruiting was over, or staff consisted of roughly 40 people, ranging from DOP to script continuity, make-up artists and costumers, sound technicians and assistants.
One additional challenge we faced was the scenes that involved horses. Through websites and a few contacts I managed to get hold of riding school East Point, located outside Berlin. I learned quite a lot about horses. They are great animals but incredibly shy and we needed several weekends of preparation to get them used to the action we wanted from them.
When it came to performances in front of the camera, I needed actors from South America, or that look South American. Since I was born in Ecuador, I got the Ecuadorian embassy in Berlin to send out a newsletter to everybody they had listed and got a pretty fair response from actors and actresses from Ecuador, Spain, Columbia and Venezuela living in Berlin. But we also have a few from Germany. They all did a great job and were real fun to work with.
We had 6 months of preparation and two very intense filming days. The team is very happy with the result and we hope that people like the trailer. We are currently expanding our website www.childrenofkings.com but already have our teaser and photos of cast and crew on facebook: facebook.com/ChildrenofKings.
