SXSW 2010

I just got back from an exhaustingly awesome road trip to Austin, TX for the South by Southwest music festival - aka SXSW.

This is the second time I've been down to the festival, both times I've had the great opportunity of working in the camera department under a good friend and great DP Joe Arcidiacono. The shoot was "top secret" so without naming any names, you can read about it here or tune in to mtvU in the coming year to see what we were shooting. Nonetheless, I look forward to this job every year as a chance watch these private performances put on exclusively for the cameras. Most of these bands I have hardly heard of, but as I experienced this last year - they do a pretty good job of predicting who will blow up this year.

Here's our incredible schedule I saved from the shoot. I made my own little notes on the bands I'm looking forward to hearing more from.


And unfortunately this tiny picture on your computer screen just doesn't give justice to this incredibly huge space we were working in.


Tech specs - we shot with 1 Red with two Anginieux zoom lenses and a few wide primes for certain shooting situations. Because we were recording live perfomances, audio was mixed and recorded in a separate part of the space, usually several hundred feet away, then sent to camera with a hardwire out of the audio snake near the band. Also coming from the snake were two lines of timecode that were genlocked to the camera and digital slate. We had a few configurations for monitors since there were a variety of monitors for director, producers, sound mixers, and onboard. Most were hard wired, but we also had a Wevi wireless HD transmitter which we used when sending monitors across several hundred feet, which saved us from having to re-cable for each setup. The wireless system was also used quite a bit for mobile handheld situations or shooting in tight spaces where running 4 lines of cable from the camera was too cumbersome.




Everything else was fairly standard. The style established for these shoots lent itself to lots of long dollies, one takes, and more stylistic shooting to highlight the architecture of the space. Lens flares, high contrast, and slow sweeping dollies, countered by high energy erratic handheld work (depending on the artist) was the name of the game on this one.