Primos was a pop-rock Brazilian band that I was the lead guitarist and that played between 1998 and 2008. In 2004, we wanted a cool and different website to reach our fan base. And I created everything, including its concept, using the top-notch technology at that moment, Macromedia Flash, that would be bought by Adobe in the next year.
It was a very fun project, where I had only the logo created by the artist and singer, Renata Muniz. So after coming up with the idea of creating a backstage with doors and different rooms (music studio, dressing room, etc), I needed to draw and animate everything from the ground up. And the biggest challenge was the studio on the first door. When entering the site, the visitor was listening to a muffled song, after all the studio door was closed. But when opening the door, the music should keep going from the same point, without interruptions, but now clear and loud.
To do it, I grabbed the original recording, removed all the high frequencies to simulate we were listening to it through the walls and pushed it with the original version to the site. Then, when the song started, I played both versions through ActionScript and muted the original version. The opening door then served as a trigger to immediately mute the muffled version and increase the original recording volume. It required a lot of testing, mainly because Internet connections were not good at that time and sometimes the players got unsynced. To overcome this, I delayed the player until having most part of the files already downloaded and the final experience was truly outstanding.
The band does not play anymore, but they have some videos on a YouTube channel, a minor WordPress blog that I developed with some old posts, and they ran a funded crowdfunding campaign in 2018 to perform a last concert, a reunion that brought together many old fans on a famous venue in Rio de Janeiro.
