Morgan Treni
Having Morgan Treni as a friend is what seems to have gotten me into the practice of recording live music. After seeing her perform for the first time I was blown away by the undeniable talent that she possesses. At the time, I had not had my Canon T3i for very long and my portfolio was lacking content to demonstrate my abilities. As a result, I saw knowing such a fantastic performer as an amazing opportunity. I knew that her performances alone would always be worth watching, therefore videos of her performances would always be engaging for viewers. But this is where I took it a step further.
While you can find live performances of most local bands on YouTube, they are usually shot on an a phone and the audio is indistinguishable. I wanted the opposite. I wanted to give my recordings more of a professional feel. Markus and I had multiple cameras at the time, so I enlisted his help to do a multicam recording of Morgan Treni’s first show at Brothers Drake.
When we recorded her the first time we only had my Canon T3i and two Sony Cyber-shots, and because of the low-light the quality of the footage was less than ideal. However, I quickly found that editing the videos in black and white would help a lot with making the quality less distracting. I edited the videos from this first show in Final Cut Pro and would synch the clips by hand.
Just about a year later Morgan would return to Brothers Drake where she had her album release show for her album “Musical Essays”. This time she would not be behind the piano, instead performing with a band and only providing vocals. This automatically made the video more engaging as it gave us more subjects to focus on during recording. We retained the same cameras we used on the previous shoot, adding a GoPro and Markus’s newly aquired Sony A7. The addition of these cameras I feel greatly improved the overall quality of the videos this time around. The images produced by the cameras may not match up entirely in terms of quality and color, but I feel these elements can be seen as stylistic traits of the videos we are able to produce. I also believe that the disparity in appearance that is inherent to the use of multiple different cameras is more than worth it when it comes to the variety of “looks” we are able to include in each video. This is also the first time we were able to get the main audio track for the show from the sound technician at Brothers Drake. Getting perfect audio from a live show is always a struggle, and he made it easy for us. I used the multicam edit feature in Adobe Premiere Pro CC to edit the videos together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaS6BkW0z-M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yswp3d4H720
This is a sing-a-long video I made for Morgan’s song about my hometown titled “Delaware”. I threw the background together in Photoshop and synched the text to the song in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Michael Garrett Media 