It's taken a week for me to recover from a great weekend in Halfax for the 2007 East Coast Music Awards. It was fun, exhausting,....and very rewarding.
Once again [email protected] was called upon to bring our arsenal of online goodness to the weekend and its festivities. We developed a new site for them called ECMA Interactive which takes a community-based approach to online marketing, education, and media distribution for the East Coast music scene.
To prime ECMA Interactive with content a team of us, which included regular [email protected] contributors, members of the Island Media Arts Co-op and a few from Holland College's Interactive Multimedia program, blitzed ECMA 2007 with a many-headed media capture project. We recorded hours of content and have come away with some stuff that is actually quite incredible. As of now a couple of dozen or so of our creations are already online, and yet several more are surely to come from the sea of unedited content we have yet to go through. You can check em out as they become available by visiting http://radio.upei.ca/ecma
A few of my faves, thus far are:
Yes, this is nothing short of broadcasting...with a global reach. Think about it. Little ol us. The world is changing my friends.
It has been a real privilege to work with the Event committee, the ECMA staff and board of directors, and the artists once again. Everyone involved went out of their way to help us do our work and for that we are very appreciative.
The Videos
The performances we captured will create a legacy for ECMA 2007 and a powerful marketing tool, a virtual calling card if you will, for the artists who are featured. When you think about it shedding light on the explosion of talent that was on display at ECMA 2007 in this way is quite a powerful idea. Young people everywhere are rapidly choosing Google Video over US-style cable television and we are prepared to deliver some fantastic content. The simple style of these videos is an intentional one that puts the emphasis on the art on display with very little in the way of over-editing. We wanted to create a window on the event, a virtual connection to the performances just as they are, and to otherwise get out of the way. We hope you find a freshness and authenticity in these videos that more than compensates for the slickness that is lost in our guerilla style of media production. Most are quite short - less than 15minutes in duration. They will now become easily searchable online, and virally marketed by the legions of die hard fans that evangelize on behalf of their favourite artist.
What a team!
And it has been a special privilege to be a part of a team which consisted of a diverse set of new media artists. We all got along quite famously....feeding off adrenalin, beer, red bull, coffee and each other to put in easily 100+ hours of work over just a few days. More about the team is here. Roughly speaking we had four teams. Two teams were out recording performances. Ideally these teams would have three camera operators and a sound engineer and they would scout a club and find the best way to capture the performance given the major constraints of a fast-moving event and the chaos of a club-like atmosphere. Another team we called "out and about" roved the city talking to people and grabbing some context for the whole festival. And yet another team edited media and worked to get it on the web. In point of fact we had much more to do than go out and make this video series. We helped operate RadioECMA once again. We produced some dvds for various display monitors distributed throughout the host hotels. Many of us wore multiple hats setting up our mobile studio, fighting technical fires, operating a camera, setting up scouting visits, editing media, and so on. As a board member I had plenty of additional duties. And we spent a lot of time networking with people, and yes, absolutely, we partied. And though we had some technical difficulties here and there which you come to expect with projects like these, we came away with some great work, and a fantastic experience. As usual we all learned a tonne.
Thanks to everyone who helped. Thanks to the sponsors who helped to make it possible. My thanks go to Mille Clarkes, IMAC coordinator, for her energy and coordinating skills which were key to making our collaboration such a success. Mille and IMAC members Andrew MacCormack, Bill Harrington, Adam MacIsaac, and Rachael Hicken showed that they know all about the ethic and charm, not to mention the expediency, of guerilla-style independent media production. Thanks to Patrick Ledwell and his team at Holland College's Interactive Multimedia Program. IMM student Peter Barrett showed that his amazing profile of Eric Broadbent was no editing fluke by bringing my ideas to life with the bumper for our series - creating the opening and closing sequences. And thanks to the students, coordinators, and supporters of [email protected], led by Ryan Palmer, Mitchell MacKenzie, Nathan Gill, Breanna Rice, Mark Corney, Kent Aitken, Matt Campbell, Tim Hamming, Shane Nauss, Curtis Fifield, and myself, who together showed once again that as a group we are in a league of our own - maybe the only in our region that can pull off such a project in this way.
Watch http://radio.upei.ca/ecma for more of our work coming online soon.
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