In the past, I've had a strange relationship with editing live concerts. They have been stylistically challenging to me, in the sense that I often want to push the envelope creatively with the approach to the edit, but the mailman doesn't accept the envelope - excess creativity is not always possible or required for several reasons, and I will elaborate.
My very first experience shooting a live concert was in Israel, when I was 17 and my brother had his Bar-Mitzva party. A famous local singer, Margalit Tzanani, who was a friend and colleague of my father, went up to the stage and sang a couple of songs, my dad played the saxophone and my brother got up and played the guitar (I guess he was in his own Bar-Mitzva band and he wouldn't have it any other way.) I had a little Hi-8 video camera (a now long forgotten video format) and I filmed the show. TERRIBLY! I thought I was being so clever, moving the camera to the beats of the music and showing off my filmmaking "skills," but the result was a shaky, nearly unwatchable recording of a music performance in which you felt the (bad) cameraman more than the performers. I really did not know what I was doing.
My first professional project that contained live concert footage was a 10 or 12 minute show I directed and edited for Coca Cola in 2006, starring R&B artist Ne-yo. The concept of the show was a live performance in a club in front of a group of excited fans, inter-cut with moments from an interview we did with the artist as well as a sit-down we arranged after the show with actual fans, who got to ask him questions and have a conversation with him. My approach to shooting the concert, which is what made the project exciting to me, was to shoot the performances with a kind of low tech, hand held, documentary feel, and to then edit it in a high-energy, slick music video style. To achieve this I had Ne-yo perform each of the three songs we featured three times (a very interesting thing to do in front of a non-film-savvy audience, by the way - I think they may have been a bit weirded out by the idea of seeing each song three times but were excited to be part of a shoot with their favorite artist) and that way I maximized our 4 or 5 cameras by getting a good amount of coverage. The result was a very stylized edit and a show that was fun to watch for 10 minutes - but I wonder if this style could hold for an hour, for a real, full concert. Or would it get tiresome? When does it become less about the musicians and more about the filmmakers? At ten minutes, it's a beautiful symbioses of performer and filmmaking style. But at an hour, would it be too much? I would not attempt a full concert in this style. It would be pointless. Besides, it is a rare live event where you could have each song performed more than once. That is a bit more of a music video shoot setup, where you do each song many times and get various angles. Usually the concert happens once, and you must capture it as interestingly and efficiently (the latter being more important) as you can.
What is interesting about the filmmaking aspect of a live concert, vs. the viewing aspect of it is this: unlike a film or dramatic television show, the viewer could care less about the filmmaking qualities of filming and/or editing a live concert. Essentially, you could go on stage with an out-of-focus, 10-dollar camera with a half-broken lens, stand on a vibrating platform and dance while you're shooting. As long as the viewer is a fan of the artist, the viewer will have fun. An editor friend of mine mentioned to me a DVD concert of an artist she and her friend love. My editor friend, noticing the edit, thought it was the most horrendous concert edit she had ever seen, and it was very distracting to her, and lowered the project's value for her. Her friend, not an editor or filmmaker, but simply a fan of the artist, LOVED it.
Now, that said, there are of course certain expectations of quality when displaying a professional production of a concert video. Naturally you would not go and shoot a concert with a 10 dollar camera and air it on prime-time television. And this is where the difference becomes evident between the ability to simply enjoy a crappy production of a good concert, and something more than that: I believe that if a concert is special in its filmmaking and production aspects, it is more memorable.
We all remember Nirvana's marvelous MTV Unplugged performance - but if all we had watched was a bootleg video of that same show, shot badly, without the luster of the nice colors and lighting, without the nice crane and dolly moves, without the great close ups of Kurt Cobain, without the nice, well-flowing, seamless live cutting between the cameras - I believe that we would certainly still enjoy the show because the music is great, but would we remember it after all these years? I doubt it. I think we remember it because in addition to the concert being great, there was a just something special about the production. We could watch it today and relive the greatness of it, perhaps recalling to ourselves a memory of the first time we saw it. Not so with a homemade-quality video. That Unplugged show had a look, a vibe, and we carry that as the memory of the show we watched, carry it with us as part of our artistic memory or cultural language or something lofty like that.
Why do we all have an image of the Woodstock festival in our heads, even if we were born years after it took place? Because the film of it has its own special "look." We would recognize it immediately. We do not really remember random YouTube videos shot by fans at concerts. We might enjoy those, but we remember productions into which thought went. Thought, imagination, honest creative effort. And what we remember has some kind of positive impact on us. And that positive impact is, well, I guess a good reason to do stuff.
And so - now that we have established a legitimate reason to take pride and care in how you approach the professional production of a concert video, I would like to speak a little about an aspect I have now experienced quite a few times, and that is the editing of live concerts, and the fine balance between creativity and simplicity.
Last year I was hired to edit a couple of videos from the American Idol live tour. One for Adam Lambert, and one for Kris Allen. I believe this was the first time I had done a live concert since the Ne-yo show three or four years earlier. In that time since the Ne-yo concert, which to remind, I approached very stylistically, and the time I sat down to edit the Kris Allen video, I had also directed and edited many music videos, in which of course, one allows oneself to have loads of fun with the editing. My head was therefore programmed by habit to approach the live concert video in the same way I would approach a music video: make it as awesome, visually, as possible.
NOT SO MUCH THE RIGHT APPROACH!
In fact, a really dumb approach, as I realized a little while later. As I began editing. I started with some highly stylized dissolves and superimposes and long fades in and out of black and some vague imagery that I managed to find in the takes - start mysterious, then slowly introduce the fact that it's Kris, and then start using the bigger wide shots... and so on. Oh, and of COURSE - I made it black and white. Because it was so artsy and cool and if it was a music video I would have tried that look on those particular images, they seemed ripe for that look. In other words, I was trying to get creative. I sent my first 30 seconds to the producer, just to make sure he was cool with the direction. When he called, the conversation went something like this:
PRODUCER: "Uh... I just saw the first 30 seconds.
ME (waiting to be showered with praise:) "Oh cool, what did you think?
PRODUCER: "I don't like it.
ME: "Oh.
PRODUCER: "You're trying too hard. You're making it into something it isn't. Just edit the concert. Don't try to make the footage into something that it's not.
My knee-jerk reaction to this conversation was "that's so silly because it looks so cool!" And mind you - it did actually look cool. The question, however, is not "does it look cool," but rather: "why is this concert video trying to look like a music video?" Two very different genres. Now - one can of course take the more stylized approach. But sometimes there is no need to. The fan just wants to watch his artist perform a song. This wisdom only appeared to me the next day.
Right after the conversation with the producer, I sat down and recut the first thirty seconds. I approached it much more traditionally, with the thought, "I am editing the concert and not trying to make it something it isn't." And lo and behold - it was fine. It was a concert. The producer was happy, and I continued, thinking "it's fine but... it can be so much more entertaining!" After sleeping on it, I realized it could not actually be more entertaining, because it was just as entertaining as it needs to be. The edit is good, the timings are good, it's energetic, fun to watch. What more do I need? Do I really need fanciness? Do I need black and white? What for?? It is a concert video of an artist singing. And that's all it is. And it's very good just like that. For it to be something else, it would have to be shot with the intention of becoming something else. My Ne-yo video was shot a certain way in order to be edited a certain way. My first instinct of forcing Kris's footage into a new style was incorrect.
But one still does need to find a way to be creative in the edit of the video, right? Of course. And this is where the nuance enters and makes the process, and the product, fun.
I am a stickler for rhythm, and "suffer" from a mild OCD about cuts being perfect rhythmically when I edit - music, dialogue, it all must be perfect (the fact that I watch it again after a few months and realize it is not perfect at all is irrelevant!) This is why I would prefer to never edit news. It would drive me insane to just stick whichever images I have together really quickly and throw a voice-over on them and worry only about the message and not the style. Within the context of editing a concert, I try to keep the rhythm perfect and interesting, ever changing and engaging, I try to keep it as exciting as possible by cutting at the correct moments to the correct cameras, I speed up the edit and slow it down as much as I feel is necessary to flow with the music and keep the experience fun, emotional, pretty, or whatever I want it to feel like at every given moment - and that is enough. That's all you need, and if you do it very well, it will make the concert more the pleasure to watch.
But - in addition to that, occasionally I will inject an overtly creative edit, one that calls attention to itself. A sudden extra fast sequence of images to enhance a musical moment, is an obvious example. These are perfectly fine to use, but judiciously. In a Tori Amos one-hour concert I cut, there was a moment where she sings the lyrics "Remember, remember, remember..." and it sounded to me as if she is echoing herself. I just had to dissolve back and forth from her close-up to a slightly wider medium-shot, and then back to the close-up, on every "remember." Three quick dissolves. I just had to! Because it's fun and it works. To introduce a little moment of extra-creativity like that can increase the production value as well as add entertainment value to the show as a whole. Suddenly the viewer is reminded, "this is a concert but it's also a film, and it's totally okay to have fun." Tori repeats the "remember" lines several times, but I only did the effect-sequence twice. First time for "cool" effect. Second time for "ooh, let's see that cool again," and that's it because by the time it gets to the third time, I preferred that the viewer plays the effect in his own head rater than sees it again.
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