“Sinfonia Amazônica is the first feature-length animated film from Brazil. It was produced entirely by Anelio Latini Filho, who devoted about five years of work to create an animated potpourri of folk stories, including the Legend of the Night, which addresses the emergence of animals in the forest, and the Urutau, which recounts the formation of the Amazon River.
Filho alone made about 500,000 drawings to make this feature film, and created his own sound techniques at a time when Brazil held very few resources in this area. Most of what he learned, he followed his intuition and creating their own procedures. Filho had only his brother Mario Latini as help as Director of Photography. People close to him say that this exhausting routine during five years of work was the major cause of a lung problem became cancer, thus ending his promising life.
A feature on Google allows users to do a search with an image, not text. This ongoing project uses that feature as a means of play and exploration into wordless storytelling. I dropped the first image into a Google Image Search window. The rest appeared as ”visually similar images” on the results page.
As an addendum to the five-year retrospective here on Nemfrog, I’m reposting a series of work I published in the early days. Then you could do a reverse image search on Google Images that yielded results based on shapes and color. This allowed me to make progressions that approached narrative in a kind of hard to express way.
Then the Google algorithm changed. Now it relies heavily on words, so it yields not so much similar images but images related by topic. I’ve never been able to replicate the searches that I could do before.
