Rare CD-i Records #17: Abrunhosa & Bandemónios (Music CD-i by Pedro Abrunhosa)
When you count all compatible CD-i discs, including all video-cd's, CD-i bridge titles and CD-i Rainbow formats, there are thousands of discs to collect. Even today, after 20 years of CD-i researching, there are unknown CD-i titles popping up. As the CD-i community discovers so many titles lately, we are passing by all of them in a new series of chronicles on Interactive Dreams: The Rare CD-i Records.
This time we see a cover of Abrunhosa & Bandemónios, a digital video on CD-i title with the music by Pedro Abrunhosa. This title was made by CITI Group in 1995. CITI was also known by the Lisboa tourism CD-i which we discussed earlier.
The CD-i Abrunhosa & Bandemónios was developed by Carlos Correia. You can find more background of this title here. Radically different from previous productions, this CD-I tried to accompany the vanguard of the musical proposals of Pedro Abrunhosa and Bandemónio. It was also an absolute debut as the first multimedia experience realized with the work of a Portuguese artist. It was important to demonstrate skills and competences in other fields that went beyond the cultural area and reference discs. This opportunity was well received by the members of the production team not only because the average age brought them closer to the target audience to which Pedro Abrunhosa's music and messages are directed.
Contrary to what happened with other initiatives, it was not necessary to resort to elements outside the group for the design, production and realization of the disc components, except for the digitization of the video in MPEG1 format, made in Belgium. The interactive model, the graphical interface, the video recordings, the 3D synthetic images, everything was produced and carried out at the Research Center, or under its supervision. The only external interference was that of Pedro Abrunhosa, who wished to view the video recordings made during his performance at the university pavilion in Coimbra.
The period that elapsed between the editorial production decision and its realization was also significantly shortened. There were only five months between the request made by Polygram / Philips Media and its completion. The capacity of internal editorial organization associated with an excellent performance in the technical domain already allowed to program production times increasingly shorter for both the execution of CD-i and CD-ROM. In the perspective of the evolution of research, this disc marked a turning point: both digital video, as well as hypertext, the synthesis image and the respective programming modalities applied to CD-i and CD-ROM, are entities that no longer require the effort initially placed in the investigation.
[Pictures and info by Carlos Correia, except for the top picture which was contributed by CD-i members Alan Bradford and Omegalfa (Luis Mota), from The World of CD-i. We originally contacted the developer behind this title: Carlos Correia, used with permission]