The Challenge: Live video & audio recording
To film a Cello Concerto and produce a HD blu-ray disc of the recording. The music was performed by Catherine Hewgill and the Verbrugghen Ensemble. Featuring some of Australia’s best musicians, most of them members of the Australian Symphony Orchestra.
The recipient of the DVD was a corporate Japanese business partner of the client. Therefore the theme of the music piece was based on the famous Japanese haiku of the frog – a three lined poem.
To connect the two cultures several images of uniquely Australian artworks were projected behind the musicians during their performance.
Music videos are traditionally done using playback. The music is pre-recorded and for the recording of the video the musicians mime the entire piece several times while getting filmed from various angles.
Unfortunately this was not possible on this occasion because the musicians could only come together during one day at Sydney’s Trackdown Studios.
Since music and vision had to be recorded simultaneously, we decided to treat this production like a multi camera live recording.
The Tasks: Multi-camera live recording
We used use 7 cameras, 4 camera operators, a camera assistant and a data wrangler to deal with the considerable amount of HD video data.
One camera delivered the time code to all the other cameras and at the same time to the music engineer for his audio recording.
The edit for this project was extremely challenging since every bit of recording was genuine. All the vision of the cameras was lined up following the order of the final music edit.
Imagine starting with a small section which was recorded during early morning, followed by a section recorded in the afternoon and followed by a section from mid morning…
Altogether the video is made up of 43 of those sections and then subdivided into edits, each showing one of 7 camera angles.
Live Event
Chamber Orchestra HD Blu-Ray DVD production
Extract from George Palmer’s “Breaking the Silence” 0’50”
Client Testimonial
“We asked Thorsten to help direct the filming of George Palmer’s cello concerto. We had commissioned the music as a special gift for an overseas business partner who was celebrating a major anniversary. We needed a high quality DVD to give them. Thorsten was in charge of the entire video side of the production. He was a great help creatively in early meetings in developing the concepts for the filming. He executed the recording, directing 7 cameras, set up the lighting and edited the recording. We are delighted with the result.”
Chairman, Pelikan Artline, Sydney