Corinne Bailey Rae Live at Vibiana in downtown LA
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck on MBE
The Flaming Lips on Morning Becomes Eclectic
The Flaming Lips came into the studio at KCRW for a live performance on Morning Becomes Eclectic. The video I did got featured on Stereogum and Pitchfork. Check it out:
Calibro 35 and Daniele Luppi
Me, Ariana, Liza, Calibro-35, and Daniele Luppi
Planet Money Live At KCRW on NPR
I produced and directed a live video webcast for KCRW in affiliation with NPR this past weekend. KCRW and National Public Radio presented This American Life’s Alex Blumberg and NPR’s Adam Davidson in a one-hour live stage show, explaining the global economic crisis in human terms. The web-cast is features on On Demand at http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/. It is also currently featured at http://www.kcrw.com/
KCRW @ SXSW 2009
For this years SXSW music conference I managed both web-cast for Morning Becomes Eclectic remotely. We had PJ Harvey and John Parish at SXSW and Peter, Bjorn and John at SXSW. For this I put together a simple one camera set-up with encoder, which we sent to Austin and streamed live from Tequilla Mocking Bird Studios. Also for the conference we built a custom page KCRW at SXSW 2009, designed by my colleague, Nathan Lubeck. The site included interactive slideshows posted via cell phone using Flickr, and live video and instantly posted video clips using Nokia N95 and an interactive video site, Kyte TV. For this project I managed the audio video content and sent out the producers/DJs with the phones we set-up. I also shot a few pre-SXSW videos at the station. The quality is very respectable considering the size of the phone and the immediacy of the upload. The audio/video isn’t great, but it is a great resource for capturing live content on the fly with upload and live capabilities. The live video takes only seconds to connect and be streaming live video to the web and the to upload content can take anywhere from seconds to a few minutes depending on the length of the video and the connection to the network. I shot a bunch of pre-SXSW videos/interviews at KCRW, my favorite being Chris Pierce:
Check out the whole feed:
We started experimenting with the technology last year as part of our of one of the bi-annual drives. It was a 24 hour web-cast that gave listeners a chance to voice and share their thoughts of the station with video. We called it “Speak Easy”, with an open mike style. Check it out:
Good Food Live!
It’s a very busy last couple of weeks… A couple of Saturday’s ago I did an event for KCRW’s show, Good Food called “Good Food Live“, which was held to a sold out audience of 500 as part of Australia week. The event was held at The Paley Center in Beverly Hills (formerly The Museum of Telivision and Radio). KCRW’s Evan Kleiman was joined by a panel of Australian food experts to discuss the explosion of high quality food and drink from down under. The Facility has a great broadcast set-up. We used 3 cameras, which I directed and switched Live. The video is available streaming at KCRw.com as well as part of KCRW’s Good Food video podcast.
Check out the video:
Beck on Morning Becomes Eclectic
Nic, Beck, Me, and Ariana
Today Beck stopped by the studios at KCRW to do a Guest DJ set with Nic Harcourt and perform a few acoustic songs. The mixed set of guest DJ/interview and acoustic session made it tricky to produce video since we were streaming live and the guest DJ set was in master control and the acoustic set was in the performance room. I basically set up the Guest DJ set like a web-cam with a wide shot of Nic and Beck from a camera that we had patched into master control that was connected to the video switcher. The tricky part was switching the audio feed from the air feed to the to the feed in the performance room from the audio engineer during the transition. Beck did the guest DJ set while Mario Diaz (KCRW audio engineer) sound checked the acoustic bass, piano and guitars. Then Nic played fill music while Beck walked down the hall to the performance room and we swicthed to the live performance. It all actually worked seamlessly as one segment. Here’s the On Demand clip of the performance.
LRC Live from the Broad Stage
This weekend for the first time ever we streamed Left, Right and Center live from the Broad stage in Santa Monica. LRC is one of KCRW’s most popular national syndicated political programs hosted by Tony Blankley, Robert Scheer, Arianna Huffington, and Matt Miller. This was my first time ever doing video for a news-cast. We had two camera operators using a Sony PD-170 for long shots and a Cannon XL-2 for the close-ups. Our crew consisting of Nathan Lubeck (Technical Producer), who designed the web page and flash player including bobblehead caricatures of the host, with Nicole Cifani and Arthur Lee controlling the cameras, and me directing and switching the shots live. We were in close quarters since the only place for us to set-up was in the control room in the back of the theater, needless to say we didn’t need walkies. Most of the set-up time was spent testing the network connection, since the college had various firewalls restricting outgoing video. I had gone there a few days before using a video loop to test the stream. We used Flash Media Encoder and Limelight Networks to stream the video live via Flash.
The Raconteurs at The Viilage
The session we did at the The Village a few weeks back with The Raconteurs aired on KCRW-FM 89.9 and KCRW.com on KCRW’s flagship music program Morning Becomes Eclectic today. For this session I brought the 4-camera set-up that is usually kept at the station. There are 4 pan, tilt, zoom cameras that I control and am able to produce the video live with an audio/video switcher which I change shots with and a camera controller that is able to control the motion of the cameras. This show was pre-taped, so I went back and edited in the mastered audio.