Rafael Braz | Amigos da Onça street parade

Projects > Amigos da Onça street parade | Trombone workshop

The street blocks that parade in the Rio de Janeiro carnival promote music workshops throughout the year to teach their repertoire to the most excited revelers. The intention is not to train musicians, but to enable the students to accompany the block musically. Teaching consists of transmitting the basic notions of the instruments so that everyone learns the songs.

The project was developed in the 2019 workshop: a series of video lessons with an opening sequence, transition, lower third credits, inserts, motion tracking, and, of course, the edition of the class itself. Automation played a fundamental role in the design of the ‘ruler’ of notes and the ‘play-along’ of music.

The entire animation was made from expressions triggered by markers. The challenge was to transform their time values into spatial values so that the note would occupy a space proportional to its duration.

All of the graphic part is defined and altered through the controllers in a ‘matrix’ composition – height of the insert, color behavior, outlines, thickness of the outlines, and size of the text before and after playing the note, bar grid, and colors, etc.

Another challenge was to make the timing of the animation obey the logic of musical notation: bars and BPM. To make this possible, I developed a metronome within AE.

Workflow

Generating the videos consists of receiving a spreadsheet with the notes and the division of the sentences of the song. From this, I export an AE-compatible text file. After that, the job becomes similar to editing: duplicating layers, composing and adjusting timing.

Special thanks to the collective Amigos da Onça for the space, and my teacher Moisés Barbosa for the opportunity and partnership. It is very pleasant when we can mix our work with our passion.