Sincero
This film Alex Sanchez, a dedicated graffiti writer known as Sincero, on his journey to becoming an established portrait muralist. Home for Sanchez is Santa Ana, Orange Cuunty, a city known for its local artistry and sometimes brutal gang violence, where tag-banging and graffiti culture run rampant. Sanchez fell in love with Hip Hop culture and sketching as a child, sharpening his skills with his friends in the neighborhood alley. Growing up in an environment with little alternatives to violence, Sanchez narrowly avoided certain lifestyles by clinging to his only form of self-expression–graffiti writing.
However, the line between street art and vandalism is razor-thin. Having spent time incarcerated for his actions, Sanchez knows the ins and outs of the ecosystem of gang violence and vandalism in Santa Ana. Sanchez now fights for his art to be respected by using community-approved walls to commemorate the local people in his community that find their livelihood on Santa Ana’s streets.
A film centered on the heart of Santa Ana, Sincero is founded on the basis of the word's meaning: sincerity. As Sanchez reminds us, it is not always about the destination, but sincerity in its truest form is about recognizing and uplifting those along the way.
Sincero (2023) Trailer
Production
This past spring, I produced this project with my best friend Jolaya Gillams our senior year at Dodge College. During post-production of my thesis, we challenged ourselves with a final project. We wanted it to be professional, clean, and meaningful so we decided to team up with our amazing cinematographer Peter Pan. What unfolded was a whirlwind three months of chaos ending with a beautiful project about celebrating your heritage through artistic expression and accessing your artistic potential despite the circumstances you may be born in.
This project was an incredible collaboration with our subject Alex Sanchez, as well as our composer Caden Bartlett, and our creative director Isabella Martino. We wanted to tell this story in an unconventionally, visually stimulating way, so we opted to tell Alex’s backstory using stop motion animation which was incredibly demanding but overall, a lot of fun.
Here I am on one of our last days of set, our stop motion shoot. With our assets created by the talented Isabella Martino, I’m helping with a little animation sequence of moving flowers. This sequence parrallels a scene in the film where Alex renunites with a street vendor whom he eternalized in a portrait in one of his Santa Ana murals.
This film for me, was an exhilarating challenge in the editing room. The story of Sincero is a long one— it touches on many sensitive topics including gang violence and underprivileged communities. It was paramount to my crew and I, that these aspects of the story were used to build the whole of Sincero’s arc without exploiting a narrative that we as a crew did not have as much experience with. As a crew from Orange County ourselves, it was also just as important for us to showcase the magnetic city of Santa Ana. Getting to know the city through Alex’s eyes was exciting and definitely created memories that will last my crew and I a lifetime.
