El Marchante is a music channel whose purpose is to share and safeguard part of the traditional Latin American sounds. During 2020, the channel released their El Marchante Social Club, a series of playlists where latin-music lovers share their favorite songs. I am honored to collaborate with El Marchante to create this videoloop for a Salsa Brava Playlist hosted by Magú Vagamundo, a Venezuelan musician and producer.
Brief and first steps
Salsa Brava is a music genre born in the sixties in New York, mixing the hispanic-caribbean music heritage with american music. It is poetry from the streets that deals with the daily problems that latin migrants encountered in the city: a mixture of violence and nostalgia blended with the latin pride, the sense of community and the joy of the cultural celebration.
Apart from being a musician and producer, Magú Vagamundo, the host of this playlist, hosts also a show called Son de la Zona, in which he travels around Venezuela getting to know the sounds of each territory.
With this information, I jumped right into the genre. Salsa speaks of life and its rhythm, it's the music that you breathe in the frenetic streets of South America... The problem was how to combine the warmth of salsa and latin culture with the situation and distance caused by COVID.
As it was mostly a personal project, first I tried experimenting and mixing some ideas to see if they could work. It was clear to me that the video it should include some instruments, so I started studying and 3D modelling some of the main instruments used to play Salsa Brava.
The original idea was to make the instruments 'dance' and play without anybody actually playing them as there was nobody on the streets playing due to the pandemic.
These were my first experiments in 3D modelling. They are far from perfect, but I think they look cool.
Instruments: conga, cuatro, maracas, claves, trombone
Rendered in Octane.
Stamps
Magu's show inspired the idea of the stamps. His trips inspired me to think about the identity of each place and how to represent it. I have always thought that a stamp is a reflection of the character of a place, in this case a print left by Salsa on the empty streets.
I designed everything in Photoshop and animated it on After Effects and Cinema4D.
The Streets
Something was missing. While thinking about how to transition between the different stamps I thought of the postcard stands on touristic spots.
After seeing many photos of inspiring and vibrant Venezuelan streets on the Internet, I decided to create one and ''sell'' my stamps at a stand, to bring the instruments and the music back to the streets.
It is difficult to describe the feeling of having taken this project forward during the pandemic, alone with my two computers rendering and almost burning. While the world was falling apart, I was finally able to work on a project related to music, which I had always wanted to do. Weird, but luckily, it was the first music project of many more.
