As the last echoes of this year’s raucous Carnival celebration dissipate, The City of Samba is having its own little party. In its first week online, 360 thousand people viewed the short film—not bad for a Carnival video clip that doesn’t feature a single close-up of a scantily clad queen of the drums, or even drums for that matter.The City of Samba is built on an orchestral cover of Samba-enredo played by a string quartet and written by co-director Jarbas Agnelli. The film itself is a stop motion piece made using over 160,000 high-resolution photos. Keith Loutit created customized lenses that allowed the directors to achieve the tilt-shift effect that makes everything look like a scale model populated by animated dolls.Agnelli, a musician and director at the AD Studio, first met the Australian Loutit in 2010 in New York during the Guggenheim YouTube Play Biennial Festival awards ceremony. At that event, Agnelli’s video Birds on Wires won an award. (See below)Regarding the tilt-shift technique, Agnelli had this to say.The video is a time-lapse movie. We would take three or four shots per second. The tilt-shift technique makes focus very critical, only on a strip of the image. That makes our brains think that it's a scale model. It's a trick that happens in our brains because they are not used to seeing images like that.If you’d like to experiment with the tilt-shift technique yourself, try out the iPhone app. Check out other works by the tilt-shift master here.
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