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“We want to do a historical event with the best Colombian artists. Due to time and production issues, nobody has been measured. Are you measured?
These were the words that María López, from Detonante, said to the founders of 242 Media, a small digital content agency that did not think twice about accepting the challenge. “How irresponsible,” says Diego Santos, 242, who wrote the script that structured the largest multiplatform concert ever lived in Colombia.
The proposal had come from the producer behind the great Colombia special Cuida Colombia, an alliance formed to lessen the impact of covid-19 on vulnerable populations in the country that, to date, have provided aid to more than a million of people throughout the national territory with resources obtained from donations.
“The premise was to think big. If this was going to be historical, it couldn’t be something that had already been done before ”, Santos says on the other end of the phone, recalling what Detonante, Gaia and 242, the companies that assembled the production of the event, imagined.
Thus, on the other side of the phone, he and the entire team began to move chips so that what thousands of Colombians could see last Friday, May 1 was accomplished: J Balvin, Juanes, Shakira, Maluma, Carlos Vives , Andrés Cepeda, Fonseca and another dozen of the best artists in the country on the same stage.
They were not only raising their voices, but the cry of solidarity for a country in which red rags abound on the facades of houses in popular neighborhoods of various capitals, alerting of the needs that are lived within, a situation that, with or without fabrics of this color, it replicates in several rural populations.
The initial bet was to bring together those singers, who since the beginning of the confinement had made some individual presentations via ‘streaming
“Carlos Vives, Shakira and Juanes have long been iconic artists nationally and internationally, and we have never seen them together in the same ‘show’,” says Santos. Therefore, the initial bet was to bring together these singers, who since the beginning of the confinement had made some individual presentations via ‘streaming’, even with a symphony orchestra included, but who had not yet met.
However – and to the delight of the public – along the way they also managed to bring together two talented paisas who, in recent years, have been at the top of the music consumption charts worldwide: J Balvin and Maluma.
From then on, the lineup of artists who took part in the concert – broadcast by television channels, radio stations, social networks and YouTube – did not fail to dazzle.
Bomba Estéreo, ChocQuibTown, Greeicy Rendón, Mike Bahía, Paola Jara, Jessi Uribe, Manuel Medrano, Nacho & Chyno Miranda, Sebastián Yatra and Yuri Buenaventura sang their best songs.
If the goal of the organizers of the concert with the line-up was ambitious, the goal that Colombia Cuida Colombia (CCC) was pursuing with the event was no less: Raise funds that aim to help with food and health security to a million and a half Colombians and supply 100,000 protection kits to health personnel for the month of May.
That task of giving a hand to those who need it most was started by the CCC on March 30 and, until the Thursday before the concert, they had already delivered more than 9,191,568 kilos of food in 150 municipalities in the country, benefiting 1,260,350 people .
Seeing the situation facing this population and with some ideas from the book ‘The American Spirit’ rumbling in his head, Diego Santos wrote the script in a matter of a couple of hours.
“As it is a matter of solidarity, of thanking the Colombians who have not let the country stop, the script flowed quite quickly. It came very from the soul, very from the heart ”, he says.
The next step was to get the singers, a task that was largely under the baton of Felipe Jaramillo, from Detonante, a renowned producer with more than two decades in the world of music.
“Surprisingly none of them said no to Felipe. All the artists were grateful that we were contacting them and sent the material within two days of requesting it, ”says Santos, and clarifies that not a single one of them charged for their appearance.
And to get thousands of Colombians to see the concert as one piece, its organizers had to put together a whole puzzle.
The singers sent songs of between 120 and 150 seconds, which then had to be corrected and ordered. But the biggest challenge was the final song: more than 40 artists participated in this song, who separately recorded the melody of the Grupo Niche from their homes that made the country vibrate that Friday night.
“That arrangement, which was in the hands of Juancho Valencia, was a titanic task that we had to do in one day,” says Diego Santos.
Another of the great challenges of a transmission of this draft in the midst of a pandemic was the technical part. That was handled by Federico Barragán and, according to Santos, from the beginning there was contact with Google, YouTube and Facebook to formulate the issuance strategy. EL TIEMPO was part of the technical team that supported 242 in the operation to launch the digital transmission of the concert from Colombia Take care of Colombia, which reached thousands of homes.
After the end of the event, which could be seen and heard through 40 media – including EL TIEMPO, City TV, Portafolio and ADN – thousands of people expressed themselves on social media about this historic concert. The union of artists, organizations, institutions, foundations, companies and people spread throughout the country under the same cause: helping together those who need it most in the midst of the covid-19 emergency.
ELTIEMPO.COM
