February 26, 2012 at 1:24 pm

Tilt-Shift Carnival in Rio de Janeiro

by twistedsifter

The Carnival in Rio de Janeiro is a world famous festival held before Lent every year and is considered the biggest carnival in the world with two million people per day on the streets. The first festivals of Rio date back to 1723. The carnival parade is filled with people and floats from various samba schools. A samba school can either be an actual school or just a collaboration of local neighbours that want to attend carnival.

The purpose of carnival is for samba schools to compete with fellow rival schools; this competition is the climax of the whole carnival festival. Each school chooses a theme to try and portray in their entry. The samba schools work to build the best floats and costumes to represent their themes, and to include the best music they can from their band called the bateria. There are many parts to each school’s entry including the six to eight floats and thousands of participants.

There is a special order that every school has to follow with their parade entries. Each school begins with the “comissão de frente”, which is the first wing. The “comissão de frente” is made up of ten to fifteen people only, and they are the ones who introduce the school and set the mood. These people have choreographic dances in fancy costumes that usually tell a short story. Following the “comissão de frente” is the first float of the samba school, called “abre-alas”.

As the parade is taking place in the Sambadrome and the balls are being held in the Copacabana Palace and beach, many of the carnival participants are at other locations. Street festivals are very common during carnival. [Source: Wikipedia]

In the incredible tilt-shift video below, entitled The City of Samba, we get an incredible glimpse into the grandeur and scale of this world-famous festival.

Made by Jarbas Agnelli and Keith Loutit and captured during the Carnival of 2011 with music by Jarbas Agnelli, this wonderful video is made from approximately 170,000 still shots. Just an incredible work of an amazing event. Perfect viewing for a lazy Sunday!