Karate & Samba?

February is the Carnaval month in Brazil, and this year it officially starts this Friday, even though it started a couple of weeks ago on the streets and in the hearts of Brazilians. However, before moving forward, I want to acknowledge that not everyone enjoys this period, and some even hate it. Nevertheless, regardless of our relationship or opinion about Carnaval, it's undeniable that this is one of our country's most substantial cultural identities.

The Além do Kiai is a creative hub focused on Karate projects that I'm the founder of; I'd like to share one of our initiatives launched in 2021 during Carnaval in the middle of the pandemic season. We wanted to provide support the best way we could: using creativity. At the same time, we created actions to gather funds to donate to those Karatecas we knew were in need, among others. I'll probably share it all here someday, but today I want to talk about our samba soundtrack developed to incentive people to stay home and how many things they could use from their martial art knowledge at home and still "party hard," but in a different way.

When producing the song, key visuals, and motion, we addressed most of the Karate styles common grounds in the lyrics. Unfortunately, this idea came a day before that Carnaval Friday, which didn't give us a considerable turnaround time to share with our ADK community, so we finished this all in around a day and a half: writing the lyrics, finding a samba singer, recording the voices, seeking and editing the music, finalizing the final soundtrack, working on design and motion graphics, besides collateral posts to spread the news.

Going through was a hella project where our team got engaged from three countries: Brazil, the United States, and Australia and the time zone differences helped a lot in this case, which is not super common.

This video is the original one created in 2021, but we decided to use 90% of the lyrics and, from now on, keep it as our theme song for Carnaval every year. Hopefully, we won't need to use the full version ever again. So please listen to the samba song "Solta o Kiai" and enjoy it.