“Novela das 8” is a series of movies about the Brazilian windsurfer Kauli Seadi. The last four years Kauli Seadi and his friends travelled the world in search of wind, waves and action. Many of these sessions were captured on film. Umi Pictures prepared the footage and put all together into videoclips.
Due to the popular demand, they put the whole series of Kauli Seadi´s film “Novela das 8” on Vimeo as well.

We also made a little interview with Umi, to get a bit more background info about the “Making of” of the “Novela das 8” project.

C7: How many footage did you get from Kauli all together?
Umi: Well, we had about 30 tapes or so from the various competitions and trips we went on with Kauli and this was fairly well organised, but with the material from Kauli it was a very different story! He didn’t have any of the original tapes and had just had his laptop stolen so all he had was a massive backup hard drive full of footage and photos from all his trips over the past few years! The footage was from a bunch of different people and in different formats. I think we ended up with about 50 GB of random files from Mr Seadi. This was the start of the ‘soap opera’ that became Novela das 8.

C7: How many hours did it take to put everything together?
Umi: We’re not talking hours, we are talking months. When I talked with Kauli in Gran Canaria back in July 2008 about doing the film, everything sounded so simple and I thought that it would be ready in a few months. It was only when we started to see what was on the hard drive that we began to realise what a challenge we had taken on. We had no idea that there were so many different video formats and how hard it would be to mix them together.

C7: Which editing software did you use?
Umi: We were using Final Cut Pro and Apple color. We used various programs to convert all the different formats.

C7: What was the goal of this project?
Umi: The single goal of this project was to show the world some great footage of Kauli windsurfing. To me he is one of the greatest wavesailors of our time and it seemed a criminal shame that this footage could disappear.

C7: Why did you decide to make an online video and not a selling DVD?
Umi: There are a few reasons for this. As I said the main goal was for people to see the footage so the internet is perfect for this. Umi is also a young company, we are finding out what we want to do and at the moment we are fully into the internet and unsure about the DVD market. We did look at getting the film out on the cover of magazines but there is so little money in the industry that this was not possible. Also we at umi are perfectionists and as we didn’t come up with the concept and film it from start to finish, it was not correct for it be the first umi DVD.

C7: What is the next umi project?
Umi: We have loads going on… The main project we are working on is ‘Just like that’, a pure wavesailing film with Alex Mussolini, Thomas Traversa and friends from all over the world just following the best forecasts, no hype, just fun sailing and travelling with friends.

 

 

 

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