visuals to a piece of music in a way that complements the soundtrack without overwhelming it. Some choose to meet the challenge by sidestepping the music, opting for the abstract, while others prefer straightforward interpretations directly connected to the song or artfully-shot performance footage. The maxim is "Whatever the song requires".

With the TV spot for Brazil's Virtuosi Festival, designer/animator/director Marcelo Garcia (formerly with Lobo, now on his own as Molho) chose a peculiar combination of the two approaches - creating abstract graphics out of sheet music notation - to spotlight live music from assorted genres.

"I approached them with the idea of using abstract, more graphical sheet music from contemporary composers like John Cage and even some contemporary dance music," explains Garcia from São Paolo. "I did an animatic just using stills and edited different sequences together using the graphics of the sheet music. And then I started designing things inspired by the sheet music - the first things that would come to my mind."

Garcia says that the sheet music created by experimental composers who eschewed standard notation was more enlightening for the process, leading to the creation of various animated creatures (crafted in Illustrator, Photoshop and hand-drawn) that bob and weave throughout the spot, as well as the logotype used in his print branding for the festival.

"With some of these guys and the way they transcribe their music, they don't really use traditional systems of notes," he explains. "They'd have graphs of intensity, or lines all over the place, or things that look like squids or something. So I went from there.

"There are sections that have things resembling sea creatures," he continues. "And there's another section with a wave suspended, like a rolling wave, but it's super-abstract - it may only look like a wave to me."

Indeed, the ultra-abstract visuals did give the client some pause.

"It's funny - at first I don't think they liked it," says Garcia, himself a musician. "They were like, 'Where's all the information about the festival?' So I had to explain to them that I was trying to build their brand a little bit more, and that whoever watched the spot would feel like they were actually 'watching the music', [that this] would be going through their heads if they had a visual interpretation of it."

Having convinced the client that "it would really differentiate them from everything else on national TV", the end result and the raves it's getting would be music to anyone's ears. "We did get a lot of attention for it - I've heard that the spot is actually being analyzed by students in universities."

Marcelo Garcia http://www.molho.tv