Creator Spotlight: Adriano Magalhães

Creator from 🇧🇷 Brazil

Hi Adriano! Please, tell us something about yourself.

I’m from Salvador, the cradle of Brazil, a city with a strong cultural life, an amazing playground to explore new stuff. I’m making AR experiences since the beginning in 2010, first in Adobe Flash and then Unity. I worked for the last 10 years with creating AR and VR installations and managed to create a lot of stuff for art-exibits using Arduinos, Kinect, Leap Motion, VR Headsets and so on. I own a digital marketing company which is not specialized in AR, but we are working a lot in AR effects for the last 15 months. I’m making effects for Instagram since June 2019. We are very proud that the first ever commercial Spark AR effect we created was for Facebook in a campaign for Rock in Rio Music Festival.

How many effects have you created so far and for which platforms?

I’ve created almost 100 effects for Instagram and Snapchat, although many of them were disabled for the first few of them were really crude and lacked polishing. Now I have around 40 active effects for Instagram.

Name the best effects you created and briefly describe them.

This is a tricky question because I love many of them and it’s quite hard to choose two. But I would say that Slick was quite an achievement for me, because I’ve managed to get a high level of visual quality while keeping small footprint in filesize which is awesome because the effect has a strong reach. Who doesn’t want to fly, anyways? The other one is Doll Me Up which is a super fun doll mask, with voice change and all that jazz that people love to play with. If I can name a third effect, I would say Light My Fire which is amazing for dance videos and after Reels it became quite a hit in my impression numbers.

Which platform for creating AR filters is your favourite and why?

I must say that Spark AR has been an amazing platform for me because it’s the biggest AR platform here in Brazil, as Snapchat has some amazing features but really low audience for commercial effects, so I’ve been focusing almost full-time in improving my effects and my knowledge in Spark AR. And I really love the node-based approach, because I was already used to work with nodes in Unity, PD, Elisa, Touch Deisgner and MaxMSP.

What in your opinion makes an AR effect successful?

I think there are two kinds of effects. There are the ones that people define as theirs and they use it every day. These effects are mostly color filters and subtle make-ups. The other kind are the “playground” effects, which take people to another dimension in the form of neon masks, animal faces, speed cars and all kind of fun and weird stuff. To make a succesful effect the creators and/or brands must have a strong knowledge of their audience and focus on the stuff this audience will love, either a simple FastColorLUT or roulette game telling them what kind of cheese they would be on Mars. The key is to really have a deep understanding of their followers and not only know what they love but also know what kind of novelty this people will be ready to experience.