A man paints a Carnival float sculpture at the Grande Rio Samba school in Rio de Janeiro, on January 22, 2013. It's from warehouses like this one that Rio's over-the-top glitz-and-glam Carnival parades emerge. The internationally renowned competition between 12 elite samba groups dazzles more than a billion spectators in person and on TV for two days, but it takes nearly a year and hundreds of workers, many of them volunteers, to pull each one together.