At Echo Video we’ve always really enjoyed filming at live events. From a corporate event to live concert filming, there’s something really exciting about seeing all your hard work that you put into planning a shoot come off especially when you have to get it right first time. So we were thrilled to be asked by leading Queen tribute act Killer Queen to come along and film a full length gig with multiple camera angles at their gig in Northampton. Although it was hard work it was also a great chance to enjoy an amazing band perform some truly incredible versions of classic Queen music.
Brief
Killer Queen wanted marketing material to help promote their act to theatres in the UK and USA and what better way to do it than with a load of great looking video content!? In order to produce this marketing content the band, headed up by lead singer Patrick Myers chose to shoot an entire gig at the Royal & Derngate theatre in Northampton. In addition to this we would also shoot an interview with Patrick and audience vox pops to create a highlights package. As well as this we would fully edit each individual track so that they could be exported separately and uploaded to YouTube or other social media channels and re-purposed for however the band wanted to use the footage in the future. The final stipulation was that everything need to be film in full 4K resolution. This was in order to future proof the footage and make it available to be used for upcoming press releases and local television advertising in the USA.
Production & equipment set-up
With such a great band and such a great venue to film in we wanted the footage we captured to be of the very highest quality and give us lots of options when it came to the edit. Therefore we proposed shooting the gig with a total of six cameras and 4 camera operators. We would have 2 cameras locked off on wides, a camera on a tripod to focus on the lead singer, a handheld camera focused on the guitar, to 2 cameras of different motion systems. The first we position just off stage at the back on a simple dolly track to give lovely fluid movement and able to pick out every instrument at different times during the gig. The second was a more complicated set-up and involved attaching a 3-axis gimbal to a feather crane which could then fly over the audience. This produced some stunning, sweeping shots of the auditorium as well as some nice vertical movement of the stage as well.
Camera 1: Locked off wide of stage
Camera 2: Close up of singer/bassist
Camera 3: Gimbal on crane for audience and stage
Camera 4: Handheld camera for guitar CU/reverse of stage
Camera 5: On stage dolly for CU of piano, drums and stage reverse
Camera 6: Locked off reverse of drums
Post-production & delivery
As I’m sure you can imagine, filming a 2 hour gig with 6 cameras, plus interviews and vox-pops, all in 4K produces quite a large amount of footage. Therefore in total it probably took around 6 weeks from filming the gig until we were able to deliver the final video content. The first stage was to get all the footage into our system and sync it all up. From there we produced a rough cut of the concert, cutting between all 6 angles and delivered this to the band for them to see how it was looking. From there we then worked with Patrick to go through each track and finesse the edit to match with the audio mix that he had been working on. Once the gig had been fully edited and colour graded we could then start putting together the highlights reel, using Patrick’s interview as the framing device for the video and inter-cutting between some of the tracks as well as snippets from the audience vox pops.