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Shooting a Music Performance Video


Kyle Kearns

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Hey guys, I'm shooting an odd type of video because it's not a music video with a track already established, but it's also not a live performance for an audience. I'm a little bit confused on how to shoot it so the music doesn't get misaligned with the audio.

There's going to be three people playing instruments together. My original idea was to just have them play it multiple times all the way through and get different angles during each time playing. Since I'm only using one audio track, would the shots from the other takes be hard to align in editing so the audio doesn't look off?

I'd rather not have to use 3 or 4 cameras and shoot it as if it were a "live" concert.

 

This is the guy I'll be shooting:

Any advice is appreciated!

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Should be reasonably straight forward I would think, to do several takes from different angles as you describe. The musicians might resist, but it would ideally be necessary to take along a metronome, with silent function and a bright light (if outdoors) that blinks for the beat, and they will have to follow the same tempo for each take. Then in post, a bit of adjustment should sync-up well enough the various shots with whatever audio take you go with for the final soundtrack. That could take a bit of work. I've haven't yet done it myself. It might help a lot if you can read music or have a musician with you when you edit it/do the soundtrack. Might save a lot of time.

And take a lot of notes, on the shoot. Eg. "Take 4, approx. 20 secs, bars 16 to 23" or whatever info you need to make the job in post much smoother.

Edit: for the benefit of those in America, I believe you call them "measures," not "bars" ?

Edited by Jon O'Brien
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If you want to shoot a "live" performance with a single camera.

Do the wide shot with the musicians playing "live" and record that sound properly. That recoding now becomes your "master" audio recoding, so keep shooting till you have a take that looks and sounds good.

Then for your subsequent shots get the musicians to "mime" along to your live "Master" recording.

This gives a hybrid live/mined video thats again easy to sync up. The trick is to shoot a take near the start that establishes sound and then everything matches that. Otherwise you risk the musicians drifting off. 

This approach can look really good and fool most people into thinking its a fully live multi-camera performance.

As Jon said it could be possible to put it together with the musicians playing live each time to a click track, they would have to be good, it would be more work to put the music together and combine the sound and not all musicians are great with click tracks - it would be possible to get lost. 

The other option is to use 2 cameras. Then you can get 2 live angles and 2 mimed angles - so it feels more live. My tutor at film school shot an Erasure video with 2 x16mm cameras at a concert. The did one pass in the sound check and another in the main concert. The footage sync up because Erasure were playing to a backing track and the speed was consistent between takes. You couldn't tell the shots were taken at different times, matched well. 

 

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Thanks guys! I ended up doing what Phil said and recording the sound first, then having them play along to the recording.

 

Seemed like they were able to play in time with the recording, so hopefully editing will be easy.

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It looks like it worked out really well. Yes, Phil's advice reflects his much greater experience. I've only done one music 'video' so far, and it was shot with a 16mm Bolex ?

So it was dubbed in post. It isn't really good enough to show - it was more a camera and lens test than anything.

Playing along to one's own recording is a much better solution than my idea of trying to get musicians to play on camera to a metronome, for several takes. That would rob the music of life. So I've learned something important here!

Edited by Jon O'Brien
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