ViX premiered on Friday 7 the series Los Artistas: Primeros Trazos, starring Ximena Romo and Maxi Iglesias. It’s a production of 360 Powwow and Audiovisual Island, written and produced by María Dueñas, who has a preferential access agreement with the platform.
In an interview, Vincenzo Gratteri, VP Senior of Development, ViX, and Adrián Santucho, Chief Creative Officer, 360 Powwow, talked about the challenges of both the production and the work of Dueñas, being her first series project.
“With María Dueñas we had already established a deal where we wanted to offer the opportunity to write her first original series, not an adaptation based on a novel as she had already done, but to offer her the place of creative leader both at the writing table leading the Writer Room as the executive producer. It is a project that has a mixture of ingredients first for the platform until now, it has some dramedy, comedy, adventure, and tension. It is a proposal of value different from what we have done previously and for the whole family,” said Gratteri.
About the diversity of topics that are currently included and integrated into this series, Santucho said: “Now we talk about María Dueñas, but we are also exploring with centennial women writers, born on a blog or WhatsApp and now have books published. Here we have an avenue because the great titles of the great writers, the TV and cinema writers, are also eager to tell theirs, so there is a whole rich territory to explore. Then we have the trends and the complicated fact of being at the right time with the right project. The stories that allow you to travel are those that move the most and Los Artistas have this, from the comfort of your home they take you to cities such as Madrid, Toledo, Marbella, or Miami.”
In this sense, Gratteri said that, in his position within the content area, his responsibility is to dare to experiment with a format or genre that appears to not fit the trends: “You have to find a balance that is not easy, between understanding and lead the trends, but also to experiment because it can become a happy surprise.”
Santucho explained that Los Artistas is a different series in many ways, not only for the multiple topics it addresses and the novelty of María Dueñas, “also the protagonists who are young, who are practically leading a project for the first time; however, they have their name and 90% of the scenes are headed by two and for both, it is a great challenge. If people discover them we will have created a new genre with two people who had not starred before. It is a risk that ‘am willing to take and that widens the borders where we have to go.”
For Vincenzo the series was a calculated risk, since before they had both Max Iglesias as part of the series to Volver a caer and Ximena Romo as one of the actresses of the María Félix series, “so we had already experienced their strength and talent. They already had visibility on our platform and became a perfect mix.”
With ten episodes, Los Artistas: Primeros Trazos is a story of fraud, deception, forgery, and suspense, set in the exclusive multimillion-dollar world of the sale of works of art. It is a story directed by Joaquín Llamas, Oriol Ferrer, and Manuel Sanabria, with Daniel Gutman and Víctor García as the producers.