Cristina Magdaleno Galdona
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE).- When David Sainz (Gran Canaria, 1987) is asked about his childhood, he goes back to the Gran Canaria neighborhood of Las Rehoyas, where he remembers that he was not a boy with many friends and that he lacked a basic ability to interact with children of his age: playing soccer.
Now, this audiovisual creator, father of one of the first Spanish web series (“Malviviendo”), pours into the book “Rub” (Today’s Issues, 2023) a good part of his childhood and adolescence as a boy with a lot of inner world who, From time to time, reap the odd victory: a first kiss, a first girlfriend…
And all this, according to what he recounted in an interview with EFE, is done from the perspective of someone who has ceased to be a child “accustomed to losing” to succeed in his field of work, not only publishing “Rub”, but also leading a of the upcoming Amazon Prime audiovisual productions, the series “En fin”, which he defines as a “post-apocalyptic action comedy”.
“Record videos and do nonsense”
“Against all odds, that loser ended up fulfilling a childhood dream,” summarizes Sainz, who adds that the book is told with a great sense of humor from the point of view of that “kid” who, according to his account, spent “too much time” in hospitals, surrounded by adults, and with his father, a Sevillian and military man, and his mother, from the Canary Islands, and “who dedicated herself to a thousand things.”
About how he came to pick up a camera for the first time, he points out that he always liked to “record videos and do nonsense” after “having failed in all the extracurricular classes” in which his parents enrolled him.
“I start recording purely as a hobby and that hobby gradually becomes something more tangible until ‘Malviviendo’ arrives,” says the author, whose main audiovisual references came to him practically as a child, when his adolescent uncle let him watch movies at his air in the living room of his house.
By Manolo Vieira to success
Regarding his sense of humor, omnipresent in the book, it is clear to him that the recently deceased Canarian humorist Manolo Vieira, with whom he came to work on some projects, has forged a good part of his references in this regard. “My parents had the typical cassette in the car and also a videotape that I blew up a lot,” Sainz details.
The path from “Malviviendo”, whose first chapter accumulates more than six million views on YouTube, to signing with one of the main streaming platforms, he explains, is 15 years of “hard work” in his production company, not exempt from some disappointments and difficulties, all of them saved by “the vocation and romanticism” towards his work as an audiovisual creator.
“People with less patience and less passion for their work than us might not have put up with it, but we are in love with what we do and we have endured and today we are working on the biggest project at a budget level that we have been on to date” , apostille.
all possible stories
He and those who work at the production company that was born with the web series, says Sainz, did not want to make “Malviviendo” forever, but to move on to making series and movies. What they wanted, he emphasizes, is to be able to dedicate themselves to that world that they liked so much and tell “all possible stories in all possible genres.”
He acknowledges that “Malviviendo” is probably the most important thing he has done to date and ironically says that he “would understand” if there were people who thought that after that success he ended up “working in a Carrefour”, but the reality, deep down, is that They have worked 15 years without interruption.
“It’s all been a really cool ride. Writing the book has been very intense and very therapeutic at times. If I could go back in time to the child I was, I would give him 20 hugs because he needed them, but I would love for that child to know that everything was going to end like this, ”he concludes. EFE