The title “Sonhando Acordado” translates to “Daydreaming”, which is a well suitable name for the state this video puts you in. It comes straight from the South of Brasil. To be honest, we were not familiar with most of the people in there but don’t let this take away from the good and interesting skating mixed with great filming and editing. This one’s feel-good content so have fun feeling good watching it.
A film by Gabriel Mafra feat. Yuri Rampazo, Kalany Varela, Davi Theobaldo, Jhonata Francisco, Nicolau Trimano, Alexandre Cotinz, Jean Spinosa, Sergio Santoro, Sidinei Dourado, Arnaldo Borges, Marcelo Garcia, Daniel Marques, John Kosch, Peter Volpi, Felipe Oliveira, Gabriel Oliveira, Luiz Coutinho, Vincente Domingues, Jonny Gasparotto, Pedro Barros & Joao Padilha
We talked to Gabriel Mafra to find out more about him, the crew and how this video came together.
Hey Gabriel! How are you?
Hey Johannes! Very well, how about you?
Thanks for providing this space to us!
All good over here, sure thing! Stoked to Dani (Galli) connected us, this video is truly beautiful. Where are you currently at? Right now I’m in Carcavelos, it’s a beach close to Lisbon, Portugal. I have family in Portugal and I’ve been living around here since September of last year.
So you moved from Brasil to Portugal?
Actually yeah! Covid flushed down all of my plans back in Brasil and so I had the chance to come to Portugal and I took it. The original idea was to come to study Cinema for a year and to try something new, but I’m liking it here so much and I got some nice opportunities going on so I’m sure I’ll stay for more.
What does “Sonhando Acordado” translate to and how did that name come about?
It means “Daydreaming”. It came to mind when I was looking for a song for the Super 8 montage and then I found a very nice one named Daydreaming by Domotic and I sent it to Yuri, at this time we were also looking for the name of the video and I told him that daydreaming was a nice name for it, but as we’ve agreed before that the name was going to be in Portuguese he said to me “Sonhando Acordado” and instantly it felt right. It fits with the feeling and ideas that I was exploring on the video and everybody liked it. We ended up not using the song but we got the name instead, haha.
How long have you been working on it?
Well, the oldest clip on the video is from October of 2018, but back then, I didn’t even know what I was doing 😂 I guess the idea to make the video got stronger when I got the HPX170 in May of 2019. For the most part, we were just filming for fun and the video was kind of constructed by itself. The last clips I filmed was on my last weekend in Brasil with Kalany by the end of August. Then when I arrived in Portugal I started the edit. So about 2 years I would say.
The whole video was filmed in Brasil?
Everything except from some Super 8 clips.
Since there’s no place to develop Super 8 film in Brasil, I brought the ones I shot for the video with me to develop around here in Europe. But when I got to Portugal I found out that one of the films still had some space to shoot, so I went outside randomly and started shooting some things before sending it to develop and ended up using some of those at the final cut. But yeah all the rest was filmed in Brasil, mostly around Florianópolis, São Paulo, and a little bit in Rio de Janeiro.
Can you go into how the crew formed?
Sure, it all happens very naturally. Me and Kalany have been skating together since we were kids, we were both born in Florianópolis, an island in the south of Brasil. We were always filming and trying to do something cool. We had the same local skate spot “Trinda Time’s” that’s where I learned to film and where we met Padilha in 2018, he had just moved into our city to study design and instantly we became friends. Kalany and Padilha were both down to film so we started with the idea to make a video. At this time we only knew Yuri over the internet, I always liked his personality and the way he skates, so I reached him out on IG, told him that I wanted to make a video and it would be very nice if he got some clips on it. So I invited him to come to our city and spend some days with us, he was super down to it and we became great homies. This whole process was a great time, the video was a vehicle for us to make a lot of friends and to get to know new places.
Super cool how all that came together!
What’s up next? I randomly bumped into one of my best friends growing up from Brasil here in Lisbon and we have some nice plans right now. Since we were kids, we were always daydreaming about opening a skate shop + hanging out space, and now we are having the opportunity to put this dream into reality here in Portugal.
So next up, I want to open the shop, and with the shop our goal is to do good for the local skate scene and to keep producing skate videos. I already started filming for some new projects, maybe for this time I even get some clips myself, haha. But of course, start this new chapter without never forgetting where I came from and all my homies and family back in Brasil.
Sounds like a good plan, can’t wait to see it all come together!
