How did we do it.

On first meeting our client Danny McQuillian we received his brief, which was three sheets, on the first sheet there was a bit about the band and a short summery of what he wanted in the video. On the second sheet was history of the Barry McGivern Band and the bands achievements and the third was a set list and what songs he would like us to record. Danny also wanted us to watch the 2007 Led Zeppelin gig, this is the style he wanted the video to be in.

Picture of Led Zeppelin

After watching the Led Zeppelin gig the group started to discuss what methods we could do to take up this challenge somethings I noticed when watching the Led Zeppelin gig was that it was a multi camera shoot but it was a large range of different cameras to get different effects to make it look fancy.

As there was five member which were Brendan Strong (me), Terry Garland, Aaron McDonald, Ryan Forgoine and Ryan O’Neill. As we didn’t have as much man power as the Led Zeppelin gig each person would be operating  a camera but as in the Led Zeppelin gig we aim to have the same video style that they did by having three different camera types which are:

Three Cannon fx100’s

Cannon DSLR 600D

Sony Z5

The FX 100’s were hand held cameras for close ups for each band member, the Z5 was a stand alone shot of the actual band from behind the crowd and the DLSR 6OOD was for all the nice artistic shots.

The main plan for the sound was to have two Roland R26’s one which would be plugged into the main sound desk to capture the sound of the instruments but as we didn’t get to see the equipment before hand we didn’t have the right XLR cable instead of a male female XLR cable we needed a female female XLR cable. the second Roland R26’s was to sit in the back corner beside the Z5 to record the atmos of the crowd and the band.

As we couldn’t record the band through the sound desk we had to think of a different strategy to record the band which was to put the two Roland R26’s at two different corners of the room and record but we didn’t just leave this to chance. We recorded the band during the sound test and listened to the playback and everything seemed to work out, we couldn’t just leave this to chance so we informed the client about this change and he seemed happy to go ahead. 

During the shooting of the gig we had to record four certain songs What’s Going on, Brute Force and Ignorance, Messin’ With the Kid and Bullfrog Blues but as we didn’t have a proper set list of the songs we had to record the whole set which was two and a half hours long.

As cannon FX 100 only has two flash disk drives that hold 40 minutes each we needed to find a solution to take the footage of the camera as the set was 2 and a half hours long. We did this by having a mac book pro and two external flash disc readers to take the footage of the flash discs and redistribute the flash discs back to the camera so the camera wasn’t left not recording the band.

Picture of Barry McGivern Band on the night of the gig.