These videos were a real seat-of-the-pants affair. A few days before the festival Eliot Duhan, EDO’s frontman, put out a call to anyone who had a video camera to come on out and shoot footage of the band. I charged up both of my cameras– the Panasonic and my old low-def Sony– and headed out. Eliot had recruited exactly one other person, so we gave him my Sony and said, “Walk around and shoot whatever you want.” I also spent too much time shooting the nearby festival and flea market that day, because I wound up not having enough battery life to get all of EDO’s set on the hi-def camera. Absolutely no planning at all, y’see. We had no idea what we’d do with the video.
While we were shooting this, I kept wondering what I’d do to make this work. Shooting a performer with one camera doesn’t offer a lot of interest, especially if you’re not aiming at the most interesting bit of the performance. Cutting between a hi-def and a low-def camera wouldn’t work well, either. Maybe throwing in some inserts from the other events might work, but that’d get kind of tedious as well. I decided that one thing I could do was mix in some stuff I’d shot at the park during _other_ festivals, and mix it in as though it had happened at _this_ festival. That stuff was low-def, and which still left me with the whole mixed-resolution problem.
It finally occurred to me that Michael Wadleigh’s film of _Woodstock_ had a solution: using a heap’o’splitscreens. Now, Wadleigh had a good reason for this approach; he and his crew had shot an _immense_ amount of footage of a mammoth event, and the only way to fit so much of it into a two-hour movie was to use splitscreens. But, my problem was not having _enough_ footage– and by reducing the high-def footage to half the size, it might ease the contrast a bit. Cribbing the _Woodstock_ approach helped a lot. It gave me some chances to do something more than a home movie, it made mixing the footage easier, and it worked as a nice joke/parody/tribute among West Philly’s aging hippie population.
Eliot liked it, too. Thing is, Eliot even liked the (many) instances where I did something really cheesy, like the occasional shaped-wipe. And the band really liked the kaleidoscopic things I threw into the “Upper Darby” song– they even stripped it from the YouTube upload to play it on screens before live shows. (Which reminds me; I should make a couple of DVDs of _just that_ so they can use them at gigs.)
So do _I_ like it? Sure– as long as I remind myself that I’m not Martin Scorsese shooting The Band in _The Last Waltz_. (He had a lot of control over that event, including installing those chandeliers over the audience.) I’m not happy about the “Open Heart Surgery” song because at that point, well, I’d run out of ideas and interesting footage. But I’m really happy with the domino-effects in “Charles Cohen,” and I think things really came together in the “Hot Wiggly Dog” segment; the segue over Todd’s keyboard opening worked wonderfully, and the slo-motion dog stuff was one of those surprises you just _live_ for when you’re doing stuff like this. (I’m also happy I had the camera on Rocco Sacco when he was dancing.)