One Camera Music Event! Boring!
 

Any ideas how to cope with doing a one camera shoot in a 1.5 hour Pub/Bar event. Mixing angles would be good but would need me to keeping leaping about. I feel just leaving the camera "on" will produce a boring shoot.

Any ideas?

Grazie

Had the same problem a while back. It doesn't have to be booring, it depends on the event and how much action is going on.

If you jump around a lot, you may loose a vital shot just because you are at a bad angle at that time. Plus you have to capture the sound to an external source since dragging a mic cable along wouldn't be a good idea, about as bad as using the internal mic :)

If you stand still, all you can do are pans and zooms which may not look to hot either.

In my case, i opted for a simple rig-it-up-on-tripod-and-forget-about-it shot and let the subject work. It came out pretty decent actually.

if you want to have a look at it, it's at.

http://www.docuwild.com/spetsnaz.php

Regards,
Henrik

Henrik - Thanks.

Yeah... I'm of the same opinion. The guys playing don't do much activity! The drummer is hidden etc etc. However, necessity being the mother of invention.... I've got some ideas which I could "fly" past you - interested?

Grazie

Shoot man shoot =)

If the music has repititious lyrics, melody, etc I find that at least with marching bands and other things like even weddings, I can movie from one spot to another as long as I know I can edit down to a frame, like in iMovie, easily, and then when the edited movie is played, although the cut scene shot picks up in an entirely new cam position you would never detect a sound break because the cut was in such a way the song picks up where it left off. But you can get into trouble if the music varies, so unless it is a very important video I would try it. A steadycam or Steady Tracker might be another option, but I hear one fellow had a hard time balancing out his Steadycam with a GL2, but although I had no problem balancing out my Steady Tracker, which is the ultralite model, I have not extensively tested it with the GL2 yet; The GL2 may be too heavy, don't know. Maybe I will get a chance today to test it.

Another favorite idea of mine would be incorporating rehearsal footage into the actual edited video, but of course they would have to be dressed the same as they would for the actual event. You could get some fake shots of them singing/playing just before the event begins if they set up early enough. You can use the iMovie option "Paste over at playhead" to paste rehearsal footage onto your video without breaking the soundtrack as long as the sound track was extracted beforehand.

Have you thought of making an actual music video? Once the soundtrack from the actual event is edited to the video, you can extract it, then play it at different locations later as they lip sync with their instruments. Then you will turn a hum drum bar video into perhaps something worthy of MTV. I guess I dream too much, yes? Anyway, just before a wedding starts, I have made the wedding piano player pretend to play, shooting at angles that don't actually let the viewer see his fingers pressing the keys, and you would never tell once that scene is edited into the actual video. The same goes for shots of the audience, even if you have to ask them to pretend to be watching the show is actually going on before it starts. I ALWAYS do this and these video fill-ins help cover up my mistakes (camera shake, etc) during editing. Don't take this suggestion lightly; it WORKS and folks may be amazed at the edited movie, thinking you actually had 3 to 5 EXTRA cams on the shoot.

Hope this helps.

Oh yes, yes yes!

I'm also thinking along the lines of a Pop Promo. Where they may be doing a Lennon number, to have some photo slide show to in-fill those messy shots to audience - yes?

Buddy your last paragraph sasy it all.

Thanks

Grazie

Grazie,

When is the shoot? If you have enough time, you might want to put the word out and get somebody to come help you shoot. I am sure that you know people out there who have camcorders. Just ask them to come help with the gig. You might also want to put up a notice on here looking for camera people w/rigs.

Regarding shooting with one camera, a few suggestions:

1) Try to make your pans smooth (eliminate jerkyness - is that a word??)
2) Avoid excessive amounts of zooming in and out.
3) Change camera angles from high to low, thus giving you multiple angles.
4) Get somebody to bring a digital camera and shoot stills for you. This will allow you to add cool looking images and allow for camera angle changes (semi-transition effect).
5) Plan your tape change as best you can. Since it is an hour and a half show, you want to try and time it with a break between songs.
6) Have fun!

Will you be capturing audio in camera or into another device?

And to spin a bit on Buddy's ideas. A lot of scenery footage is never wrong since you can do it apart from the actual event. Exterior shots of the place of the vent, crowd shots, people setting up, soundchecking, etc. All good fill out material especially for intro's and titles.

/Henrik

Henrik - yup!

I've got Video Factory - small brother to Vegas Video - I'm also thinking of having a copy of a clip and use the Pan/Crop and dissolve to an area of the clip not zooomed to in the original. Hard to explain in this email. But do you understnad what I'm driving at?

Grazie

Yepp. but remember that if you zoom in on the video (in post that is), you expand the pixels.. now if its very quick this can be an effect in itself (pixelating) but you can also hide it by applying a blur, then it becomes a zoom-focus dissolve. Looks pretty nifty.

Another thing you might want to do is this. Get some sort of editing idea in your head (Assuming you know what the song is beforehand) and then maybe do some zooms at some interesting times where you'd want to go to closeup etc (Guitar solo or whatever). Then after the song's over, if you can get crowd shots, even of the crown jumping to another band, and cut them in where the actual zoom would take place. Dunno if this would work well as I've never tried it, just an idea.