harshbarge

Sasquatch! Fest: Videos at the Edge of the Gorge

Mito — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:23:21 +0000

We went to Sasquatch! Music Fest 2012 and made some Field Recordings videos backstage. Such a beautiful place to shoot, it’s hard to go wrong.

And some that I helped with but were edited by KEXP:

Live Concert Video Roundup: Spiritualized, Of Montreal, Kishi Bashi, Regina Spektor

Mito — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:08:30 +0000

Over the past several months I’ve had the awesome opportunity to direct live video for some great performances. We now have a pretty sleek “fly-pack” live video kit (and by sleek I mean 70 lbs, plus cameras and cables and monitors, so not exactly a briefcase) that we’re able to load in a van and bring over to the 9:30 Club in DC, or anywhere with a fat pipe of bandwidth, and live-stream HD video to our site and mobile apps. We premiered this technology with The Shins’ show in NYC, and have used it since to live-stream concerts by Lost In The Trees, Of Montreal, Kishi Bashi, Spiritualized, Regina Spektor, Hot Chip, and most recently full-weekend coverage of both the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals.

Each of these have full concerts posted, but here are a few of my favorite excerpts.

OF MONTREAL: ‘SHE’S A REJECTOR’ – One of the most lively shows. Check out the crowd-surfing luchador-bodysuit dancer at 3:50.

OF MONTREAL: ‘NONPAREIL OF FAVOR’ – The best moment ever starts around 3:45

SPIRITUALIZED: ‘LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WE ARE FLOATING IN SPACE’ – Such a pretty song, and cool space projections

Lost In The Trees: Live Video At (Le) Poisson Rouge

That Time I Sort Of Messed With Texas: SXSW

Rachel & Jacob Getting Married

Lost In The Trees: Live Video At (Le) Poisson Rouge

Mito — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 03:40:56 +0000

I’ve spent a significant portion of the last year researching, trying out, installing, and finally running a live video streaming setup at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a multi-genre venue in NYC’s West Village. I think we’ve finally figured it out, especially matching the camera colors which was the biggest pain ever, and I’ve gotten more comfortable switching on the fly (camera 1, camera 2, etc.)

AJ Wilhelm and Doron Schachter manned the cams for this show — dream team, especially easy now with the new intercom system so I can communicate with them directly and call shots. The whole “live” thing is less intimidating now too, though of course there are still the occasional hiccups. I usually don’t realize until halfway through that I’m gettin DOWN moving to the beat at the controls, even when I’m not particularly into the music. I guess it helps feel out when to cut to things, though I’m sure I look like a total fool doing it.

Here are some clips, and you can watch the full show HERE.

St. Vincent, Live at 9:30 Club

That Time I Sort Of Messed With Texas: SXSW

Rachel & Jacob Getting Married

Jeremy Denk Does The Goldbergs

Mito — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 03:52:35 +0000

Last fall, while producing a series of videos of classical musicians in their apartments, we spent a little extra time with weirdo-genius pianist Jeremy Denk to record some of his musings about Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which he has been learning. The result is three blog-ish videos that I tried to edit down from his fascinating but a bit meandering ramblings without sacrificing the ideas he was trying to convey. I always think it impressive when somebody can talk about a subject I really have no interest in and make it understandable and exciting. This guy is cool as hell. Read his blog posts about the Goldberg Variations HERE.

St. Vincent, Live at 9:30 Club

That Time I Sort Of Messed With Texas: SXSW

Rachel & Jacob Getting Married

That Time I Sort Of Messed With Texas: Scenes From SXSW

Mito — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:42:22 +0000

I just returned from being baptized by the beer and sweat of my first ever South By Southwest festival in Austin, Tex. where I went with NPR Music to manage photo coverage and produce some Field Recordings. Mostly I edited while Katie Hayes Luke absolutely killed it taking photos of the bands at our showcase and day party, but I did manage to get out and get some scenery.

I’ve also been working on my iPhone photos skills, trying a couple of different in-phone editors and posting to Instagram. Some of these pics are from our shows, some are from other shows I went to see, and some are behind the scenes of the Field Recordings.

Jeremy Denk Does The Goldbergs

Field Recordings: David Wax Museum

Rachel & Jacob Getting Married

NYC Winter Jazzfest: The Video Adventure Continues

Mito — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:31:19 +0000

So many knobs and buttons! I went up to New York again for Winter Jazzfest to try out our new live switcher at (Le) Poisson Rouge, a venue in the West Village that NPR Music has begun a relationship with. Basically we’ll be installing all this new gear to set the place up for live-streaming video, so whenever a band or artist comes through who we want to feature, we can broadcast the concert.

This is all a work in progress, and I’m hoping to get to a point where if it was a big deal show we could bring in a couple videographers to operate cameras up on stage, but for now we’ve just got a couple of remote-controlled cameras fixed to the ceiling, and a camera on a tripod on stage. Obviously the cameras that are closer look nicer, but the remote control pan-tilt-zoom cams let you do the whole thing as a one man operation, while still getting a variety of shots.

This show was a bit of a challenge, since I was doing the video by myself, so I had to keep fighting my way through the crowd to get to the stage to re-adjust the stationary camera, and come back to the switcher to direct (“camera 1, camera 2″ etc.) I still don’t know what half those buttons do, but hopefully I’ll figure it out soon!

Field Recordings: David Wax Museum

St. Vincent, Live at 9:30 Club

Rachel & Jacob Getting Married

Field Recordings: David Wax Museum

Mito — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 06:56:14 +0000

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a new video series for NPR Music called “Field Recordings”. The videos in the series are a bit varied, because they all sort of started as different projects and ended up grouped as performances that take place in strange places outside of NPR (to differentiate from the Tiny Desk or Studio 4A sessions.) We’ve finally gotten around to releasing them, and the first to be promoted is David Wax Museum.

This video and a few others we shot in the ruins of Fort Adams during the Newport Folk and Newport Jazz Festival weekends are the dearest to my heart, because they began as my pet project, when I finagled some time out of my regular festival duties to shoot some spontaneous “rogue” video. With the help of my colleagues, most notably Mike Katzif at Folk Fest and Patrick Jarenwattananon during Jazz Fest, we wrangled some stellar musicians who were game to tromp through weeds and broken glass to get to this awesomely decrepit part of the old fort, just outside Festival boundaries. Rockstar audio engineer Kevin Wait hooked us up with the fluffy shotgun mic and recorder, and fixed up all the sound in post.

For this shoot, the band was incredibly gracious and obliged us to play the song three times through, so with only two cameras, including Mike as second shooter with his shaky broken arm, we were able to get enough decent footage to stitch something together. It took a while for NPR to find a place for these little orphan videos, but the “Field Recordings” umbrella really fits well.

I’d like to do more shoots like this one, that feel energetic and spontaneous and kind of secret and magical. The obvious influence is Vincent Moon and his “Take Away Show” videos for La Blogothèque, but with more than one camera angle. I like the intimacy of Moon’s stuff, so I’ll use him as a starting point as I figure out what I’m doing with this thing, and what my own video style will become.

Folk Yeah! Weekend #1 At Newport Fest.

St. Vincent, Live at 9:30 Club

Rachel & Jacob Getting Married

Rachel & Jacob Getting Married: Video & Photos

Mito — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:45:12 +0000

I was asked to photograph my colleague Jacob’s wedding to his fiance Rachel, in Roxbury, a few hours upstate from NYC. This was the first wedding I’ve ever shot, and of course I decided to be insane and simultaneously attempt to make a wedding video. Often this meant balancing the video cam in my left hand as I took photos with my right, which is why so much of the footage is shaky. The wedding was wet, but delightful, and everybody seemed to have a good time. Hopefully I managed to capture some of that.

The songs I chose from the actual playlist at the wedding. The Yo La Tengo song actually played during the ceremony as Jacob approached the chuppa, and Jacob and Rachel did in fact have their first dance to the Otis Redding song. And I’m not sure if this works, but at the very end I transition the R.Kelly song on the soundtrack to the actual audio of that song playing on site. I also tried something goofy and made a mashup of the traditional Jewish song from the indoor ceremony with Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” because they weirdly lined up almost perfectly.

I think if I ever do this in the future I’ll come more prepared to do video, with proper audio recording equipment, and perhaps not attempt to take photos at the same time. The photos themselves were a bit of a challenge, because the ceremony took place just before sundown, it was drizzling rain, and much of it was inside with very low light. I took a ton of photos, all of which you can see HERE, but here are a handful of my favorites:

The Adventures of The Walking Box: Marriage Proposal/Ode to Chicago ♡

Echo. Echo. Echo. Echo. An Experiment In Sound.

IT’S PUMPKIN TIIIIIME!

St. Vincent, Live at 9:30 Club

Mito — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:09:15 +0000

Had another go at live-loading photos to go along with NPR Music’s live-stream of a St. Vincent concert at 9:30 Club in DC. Same deal: up front to take photos for the first 3 songs, then hustle up to the crow’s nest to dump and upload to Flickr. The show was great, that woman can SHRED.

Also, this job totally doesn’t suck.

Zola Jesus: Adventures In Live-Streaming Video

Sasquatch Fest

Bon Iver, Live.