Usually for American Pancake, I shoot Live Performance videos in a down and dirty raw way but every once in a while it is fun to take a different approach and actually try to capture the fun and intensity of a live through editing and creative license. For The Lovely Bad Things performance of a new song entitled "Space Waste" it was apparent to me that the crowd dynamics had to be an important part of the story.
Shooting smooth live video at a venue is always a challenge if not impossible. The Lovely Bad Things always inspire dancing, moshing and even circle pits so getting caught in the fray is an occupational hazard. The herky jerky style of this video in particular was due to an active crowd. The source video looks like it was shot on horseback. It is bumpy and rather unappealing to look at but the sound I captured on my stereo mics was pretty exceptional. I decided to add more bumps than smooth them out and to purposely, cut and zoom closer to, if nothing else, make the added jump cuts add a disjointed messy (yet stylized) look to an already bumpy video. I also had some short bursts of crowd shots from their set that served as such cool cutaways. It was important to me from a creative standpoint that these shots were displayed in slow motion to cue to the viewer that these were slices of time. The added benefit was finding the little cool happenings within the footage as people in the audience expressed themselves to The Lovely Bad Things music. Lastly, I opted to strip away the color. The black and white tones cleared up and highlighted details that seemed to blend together in the color footage especially in the crowd shots and besides I just love the look of black and white.
The serene look of faces swaying in slow motion, the smiles and energy pushing up a crowd surfer and the two kids crowd surfing only to spontaneously high five each other. I love the energy they spawned as you can see people cheering them on. It is a moment in time, slowly revealed. After the video aired on line. One of the high five kids tweeted about the video and mentioned that the other kid was a stranger. That makes the moment even more special.
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Robb Donker
(screen shots)
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