Arkansas Band Promo

 

Promo for Kent based Rock and Metal covers band Arkansas.

Production

Arkansas played at the Penny Theatre in Canterbury on 15/04/2023, and the band asked me to film their performance and produce a promo video for them.

To do this, I had 2 Canon 550Ds and a Go Pro Hero 7 on tripods, while a moved around the stage with my Blackmagic Cinema Camera on a shoulder mount to get lots of different angles.

One of the Canon's used a 50mm and the other a 35mm lens. During the break in their set, I switched the lenses do give slightly different perspectives. On the Blackmagic, I used a 35-70mm zoom.

To record the audio, I set up my Tascam DR-40 with a Rode M5 mic on each side of the stage, plus a Tascam DR-07 for backup. I'm so glad I had the backup, because the DR-40 had an issue and kept switching off.

In post I synced all the camera angles with the audio recording and used the Multi-Cam edit abilities of Davinci Resolve to edit the entire gig - about a two hour programme. I made a first pass by watching back in real time and switching angles as it played out.

Multi-Cam editing in Davinci Resolve

Then I went back and refined the edit, digitally zooming sometimes to give some variation. The GoPro recorded in 4K, so punching in was no problem. The Canon's are only 1080, so I could only zoom slightly. Unfortunately, Camera B was focused to the centre of the stage (I was not monitoring it during the recording), so a fair amount of the footage was out of focus, and could only be used when the guitarist was standing in exactly the right location.

Once the entire gig was finished, I duplicated the timeline and cut it down to the 9 minute promo (changing the order of the songs slightly to get the best transitions between them),

Since this was a live recording, and I had ensured all the cameras were accurately white balanced, there was no reason to colour grade, other than apply a LUT to the BM camera to bring it into Rec.709 and a bit of denoising on the GoPro footage.

Equipment Used

Blackmagic Cinema Camera, Canon 550D (two), Go Pro Hero 7, Tascam DR07

My Roles

Camera Operator, Sound Recordist, Editor