Den Bento
In 2015 I started being invited to help with some translations for a production company in Los Angeles, California and after that project, so many more came to me! Amazing documentaries around the lives of the greatest musicians in countries like Cuba and Venezuela, their struggles with the political circumstances, and how their knowledge of music was the key for them to leave their communist countries as some of the few that were able to because they represented their nations through music and culture.
It started in 2016 with the translations of the Buena Vista Social Club documentary before the artists passed away. It was the most exciting adventure since I was born to a Brazilian musician and radio producer, and grew up in recording studios in Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Miami.
When I created the English version of the context of these Cuban musicians I started getting more and more invitations to translate documentaries from the whole continent. (Cuban Spanish is kind of hard to interpret into English due to the amount of expressiveness in their language, but I am certain that my knowledge of Portuguese as my father's mother tongue helped me interpret not only Spanish from Cuba but also through the years I have translated so many voices from Latin America into English).
In 2019 I started working with another great company that was producing the documentary of the life of Gustavo Dudamel, the great Venezuelan Orchestra Director while he was overseeing the Los Angeles Orchestra. That project lasted for 3 years and it was an exciting, emotional, fascinating, and learning experience, since it was my job to listen to the microphone that was on Dudamel while he was directing shows around the world, I got to hear literally what he says and thinks while in action. I seriously found these two jobs, Viva Maestro! and Adios! Two of the most extraordinary privileges in my career.
Sadly by 2020 many of the production companies I worked for 5 years had to shut down. The same happened with many of my regular Design and Art clients, so after I finished Dudamel's project in 2021, I started a couple of entrepreneurships that you can find in my portfolio.
Note: there were so many projects during those years, that I barely remember!
In translation and transcriptions production, differently from design, I adapted and learned from the preferred programs each production company and their editors asked me to use. That allowed me to learn multiple systems and ways of doing things! Each mind is a world, each project has a particular workflow, and each time, I learned more tech tools.
Most of the projects have signed NDAs, so I can't show much of the process, but this may give an idea: