TV Globo - Earning a seat in the directors' room

Moving to Zorra, the network's Saturday-night comedy institution, my way of operating changed into something unusual for a designer at the network.

Each week, the show's creators and directors met to plan what would be filmed: which sketches, how they connected, where the visual jokes lived. Designers were not normally in that room; the VFX supervisor attended and distributed tasks downward. I sat in those planning sessions directly, every week, giving opinions and defining the motion graphics, animations and visual interventions at the moment the show was being conceived, not after.

The VFX supervisor remained responsible for on-set supervision, ensuring blue screens, lighting and plates were shot for clean compositing, and reviewed my work, but I operated with a high degree of independence. At the start of each season I created the show's new transition language, the connective tissue between sketches, and delivered the visual treatments that turned sketches into graphic jokes: a scene styled as a GTA-era video game, complete with game interface and tracked dialogue balloons, is a fair sample of the weekly brief.

The technical ceiling was high, and the "Esteira da Vida" sketch is the clearest example. Fernando Caruso had to age some sixty years in twenty seconds, on camera, with no prosthetics or makeup of any kind. Shots like that are not one discipline; they are several, running in parallel to a single air date, and I owned all of the 3D: the actor's head sculpted as a digital double in ZBrush from the tracked plate, then hair, beard and moustache grown, groomed and simulated procedurally in SideFX Houdini, with animation controls rigged so the growth could be timed to the joke, and rendered to hand on for the composite. Feature-film technique, delivered on a weekly comedy deadline.

The rest of the shot belonged to specialists in their own disciplines: 3D camera tracking by Leonardo Lino, the ageing of the face itself as 2D matte painting by Tiago Silverio, and final compositing by Gabriel Studart, under VFX supervisor Marcelo Mariz. Globo's own Gshow published a step-by-step breakdown of exactly that pipeline, crediting each stage by name, alongside a video in which I walk through how the effect was built. Read the breakdown on Gshow.

For most seasons I worked this way alone. Later seasons added one, then two designers working under my steer and direction, and for complex shots I directed compositors and 3D animators as the sketch required.