Fantastic Soup is a hearty broth of creativity, expertise and enthusiasm. Formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, FANSO is a collaborative and a creative services group. Specializing in media production, our team will take a project from start to finish, through all stages of development and production. Our soup is never canned — we approach each project with a uniqueness that brings it to life.

If you are interested in what we do please feel free to contact us, we will love to hear from you!

Luis Blackaller has a multidisciplinary background that covers aspects of entertainment, science, design, art and visual storytelling. He earned a BS with honors as a mathematician in the UNAM, and has been trained as an animator in the Vancouver Film School.

With more than 10 years of experience in the Mexican film and television industry, Luis has worked as a designer, art director, motion graphics artist and storyboard artist among academy award winners in films like Amores Perros and Babel.

In 2008, Luis earned a MS from the MIT Media Lab under the mentorship of John Maeda, where he explored online creative social systems and their relationship with artistic expression and communication.

After graduating from MIT, Luis worked as a Producer and Creative Director for the Next Billion Network at the MIT Media Lab, where he designed and supervised the execution of alternative strategies of communication and promotion of research, directing a team of documentary videographers and web developers for more than a year.

Luis has a big cranium that can only be matched by the size of his imagination.

Luisa is a documentary and experimental filmmaker with an interest in how different types of media proliferate in our culture. She has worked as a freelance editor in independent film (Enlighten Up!) and as a documentary filmmaker for various non-profit organizations in the Boston area.

Luisa earned her MA in Visual Media Arts from Emerson College, where she focused on documentary and experimental filmmaking. Prior to that, she worked in the publishing industry with New York Magazine and Random House, Inc. She holds a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Bennington College.

Liz Jones is a writer, producer and photographer with Fantastic Soup. She has freelanced as a production assistant, coordinator, researcher and videographer in independent film, television, and educational media production in the Boston area for the past four years. Her credits include programming for PBS (American Experience, Design Squad, NOVA scienceNow) and HGTV (Property Virgins).

Liz received her MA in Film and Video production from Emerson College in 2007, focusing in documentary and experimental film, and her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College.

Her interests are in cinematography, alternative storytelling and rock and roll music.

Max Wagenblass is a narrative and documentary filmmaker who began shooting and editing digital video at the age of 13. Since then, he has closely followed the advancements in video technology to appreciate the medium's flexibility for experimentation. He completed his B.A. in Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College.

Max has worked for clients at the MIT Media Lab and the RFK Memorial. His personal work focuses on the psychological impact of media and the aesthetics of alternative production techniques. He has screened in the Czech Republic at the Pisek International Student Film Festival, the Rochester International Film Festival, and the Woods Hole Film Festival.

As a hobby, Max also enjoys writing and illustrating children's books.

Nicole Prowell is an independent documentary filmmaker living in Boston. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Experimental Documentary at Emerson College, where she completed her MA in Documentary Video in 2008. In addition, Nicole has studied filmmaking at FAMU in Prague, where she produced a short fictional narrative piece about the westernization of Eastern European culture.

Prior to moving to Boston, Nicole worked in New York for IBM and for the Jacob Burns Film Center, a non-profit art house focused on promoting visual media literacy. Nicole has also worked as a Media Production Manager at Nextlab in the MIT Media Lab, where she travelled to the Philippines to film a documentary about a mobile diagnostics project. Her recent projects include a personal documentary about traveling across the country in search of happiness, entitled Happy Hunting, which screened at the 2009 Emerson Film Festival in LA and at the 2009 New Hampshire Film Festival.

Nicole is a Board member of Women in Film & Video/New England and a member of Connect the Docs.

Cast
Monica - Renee Roy
Dr. Walker - Marc Baizman
Research Assistant - Hiba

Crew
Director - Luis Blackaller
Technical Consultants - Gianluca De Luca, Serge Roy, Aimee Klein

Producer - Liz Jones
Cinematographer - Max Wagenblass
1st Assistant Director - Andrea Di Cocco
Art Director - Luisa Ehrich
Decorator - Amy Strong

Editor - Max Wagenblass
Sound Recording - Brian Misiewicz
Compositing - Luis Blackaller