LIVE IN THE NEVE POST MORTEM BLOG #1
- Jordan Aston
- May 2, 2019
- 3 min read
Ok so… the end of this trimester has been a very busy one to say the least. I haven’t been as proactive as I was at the beginning in terms of reflecting week by week but I am very happy and proud of product I have created. Live in the Neve is a live music session I designed from top to bottom in the hope to gain experience in live recording/ mixing/ film/ set design and supplying audio assets. I have learned so much working on this project and was extremely happy with the crew I put together to work on this with me. I have submitted an edit of the film with some roughly mixed audio that still needs a bit of work. Mon Riser recorded two songs on the day and the final cut will be about 11 minutes in length but what I have submitted is just the first song (5 minutes).
Alfred, who is the editor has been very busy and was constricted by time to get the final cut completely finished but we will be working together over the next few weeks to finalize the deliverable and post it online. This blog is intended to be a sort of ‘post mortem’ reflection of the entire project. I’ll go over the preparation and planning/ the recording session/ and what we did in post to break down how the project was created from start to finish.
Live in the Neve was inspired by live sessions such as KEXP, Tiny Desk, Audiotree etc. I watch these sessions online all the time and wanted to created one of my own. It seemed like a pretty daunting task to begin with but I really wanted to pull it off. I started by finding a group I thought would be a fairly easy band to record but also have a style of music I like to listen to. Mon Riser were the perfect fit, especially since they are instrumental so I didn’t have to worry too much about drum bleed in the microphones etc. I jumped onto the SAE interdisciplinary page and sought out a couple of talented film students Alfred and Max. I paired them up with a friend of mine Sean who will be starting a film course at SAE next trimester. As for the audio side of things, I got my good friends Mike and Alice who are in trimester 4 to help with recording and the setup on the day. My role was to produce/ help direct and finally mix the audio. Not including myself there were 8 people in total working on this project.
It was quite hard trying to organise that many people to be in a room all at the same time! I had originally planned to have a practice session with the band and any one of the film or audio crew who could be there. This was going to be a week or two before the actual session but it turned out that we were unable to make that happen due to people and equipment being unavailable. I wanted to do this so the actual session on the day went as smooth as possible in terms of knowing how we were going to EQ and perhaps find some camera angles to minimise time spent on the day. It turns out that we didn’t really need to do that as everything ended up going almost perfectly on the day. Something to consider in the future as it might not have been a waste of my time but when working with other people on a project I realised I have to take into consideration what I’m asking of them.
Perhaps a band or a film crew I haven’t worked with before might not be as interested in working on projects that are going to require them to take a number of days out of their week unnecessarily. Now that I have a project idea in place, a band to record and a production crew finalised it’s time to start thinking about how I would like the set design to look/ create a stage plot and chose some microphones. I think I’ll create a second ‘post mortem’ reflection blog as there is still a lot to talk about.
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