Criolla is a production service company based in Uruguay. Its founder, Eduardo Ruggieri, has more than 35 years experience in the field of audiovisual production, with more than 2000 projects for national and international brands.
Uruguay is one of the region’s leaders in production services where many global campaigns have taken place. Some of them include films and series which feature highly recognized celebrities from all over the world.
Uruguay’s sustained and constant growth is the result of a unique combination of location assets and benefits ranging from a friendly logistic to a positive geographical and political environment. Safety and economic stability allow Uruguay to offer high quality services coupled with resource optimization. These characteristics translate into better production and shooting conditions making it an attractive and hard to beat shooting site.
Crowning the previous benefits mentioned above, there are also highly talented acting professionals including a population of mainly European descendants (88%) and a cultural influence that manifests in the Uruguayan architecture and lifestyle. Moreover, first class equipment is available and updated through continuous and consistent investments made by private companies such as Musitelli Film & Digital (www.musitelli.com). The crews are well trained and experienced as a result of an average of 300 days of shootings that take place in Uruguay per year.
Uruguay is strategically located between the 30º and 35º parallels, as are Australia, South Africa and New Zealand which results in similar natural light, climate and geographic conditions.
With a territorial extension of 177,000 km2, Uruguay is small compared to its neighbors Brazil and Argentina but its size becomes an important advantage at producing and shooting. It offers a wide variety of locations relatively near from each other and within a few hours of travel which saves a considerable amount of time.
For instance, within a radio of 170 km from the capital, Montevideo (which offers spots such as parks, city squares and a combination of classic European with modern architecture), we can find sierras, valleys and prairies as well as oceanic beaches with European style resorts such as Punta del Este and Piriápolis, as well as colonial cities like Colonia del Sacramento that holds the status of World Heritage Site.
This geographical closeness between location sites creates friendly logistics that translate into resource optimization both in economic and shooting time terms.
Uruguay is strongly committed to provide high level services to the world in a wide range of areas such as tourism, information technology, software development, visual arts and logistics. These, together with its traditional agricultural sector, represent the main economic activities. Accordingly, Uruguayans seek to deepen their professional skills training and expanding their education as well as learning foreign languages. Uruguay holds the highest literacy rate of the region (98%) as measured by the United Nations (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/socind/).
In order to make its service offer more competitive, Uruguay has policies to create incentives for investment in non-traditional areas, specifically in the production services sector which counts with the support of the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Education and Culture through the Film and Audiovisuals Institute. This support allows to develop projects that are considered of touristic or press interest and benefit from special taxes status and simplified administrative processes such as applications for temporary visas and shooting permits in public sites.