As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent some time this summer coordinating some acoustic sessions for Fieldview Festival, and I thought I’d write you a little post about them and what I did.
Making seat backs for our "loveseats". Sorry its all blurry. My bad.
There is an area of Fieldview that hides amongst the trees and only opens late at night. This crazy little world is known as Dreamland, and is run by the fantastically bonkers Lewis (who put together the little image at the top of this post) . The point of Dreamland (as I suppose could be said of festivals as a whole really) is to stumble upon things, from birdcages and bunting in the trees, to a dancefloor hiding under the crest of a wave and a secret doorway in the wall. Taking this whole idea to it’s logical conclusion, Lewis wanted to continue allowing people to stumble across things even after the festival had finished, and so the Dreamland Sessions came into being. These one take, one track acoustic sessions from 17 bands at the festival are being uploaded onto youtube one at a time allowing festival goers to relive the Fieldview magic and discover bands they missed while they were there. The original concept was to build our set in a small clearing next to Dreamland, but massive amounts of noise interference from the Barnacle Stage meant we had to reconsider, and ended up building the whole set in an empty shed at the back of the site. Festival handyman, the uber talented Ed Peel, waved his magic wand and created us a surreal living room with an aquatic twist.
- Filming a session with Picture Book
The sessions were filmed by Jeremy from the fabulous Tinderflint productions, (plus a couple of extra hands from Two Fish Films‘ Rosie and Chris) , on two super shiny Canon 5D mk IIs and a 550D. I’m definitely a Canon girl, and the 5Ds practically had me salivating, but I wasn’t allowed to fiddle with them for obvious reasons! I was, however, allowed to use the clapperboard at the start of takes, which was about all the responsibility I felt safe having when it came to the actual filming!
Prior to arriving at the festival, Lewis had charged me with the task of emailing all the artists appearing at Fieldview to find out if they would be interested in getting involved, and scheduling them accordingly. I made a marvelous spreadsheet on google docs of all the time slots, working around performances on the main stage to minimise sound interference. In the end though, the Barnacle stage proved more of a sound issue and my timings went out of the window, causing a hasty reshuffle and a lot of frantic emailing from my “site office” (see pic below right)
My office @ Fieldview - the floor of my tent
Working on the floor of a tent is not the most comfortable of office spaces, but now I’ve finally joined the 21st century and got a smartphone I can work from anywhere, and if I insist on working at events in fields in the middle of nowhere then I’ve got to learn to be super adaptable!
As the festival drew to a close and we were running out of time to fit all the awesome bands in, we packed up our little shed and stuffed the hay bales and standard lamp onto the back of a quad bike and snuck off to a nearby field to film our sessions with Sam Green and Beth Rowley. Despite a little noise interference from Laid Blak playing on the main stage we managed to capture a beautiful little festival moment, just before sunset with the campsites and flags in the background.
As I have a serious interest in film production it was the perfect role for me; I was able to see a side of the film industry that I hadn’t really been involved with before and was able to turn my skills to a more unusual task, whilst at the same time enjoying some incredible performances and a fantastic festival. At the moment there’s 17 videos up on youtube (a couple of which aren’t from the festival, so i didn’t have a hand in making them!) and we’ve got about 10,000 views altogether, which is pretty exciting for a novice film-maker like me! They all look pretty friggin’ awesome, thanks to the skillful editing of the Tinderflint guys and of course the masterful camera work of the crew, and it was great to be a part of the whole experience! All I can say is roll on Fieldview 2012!!
If you want to, you can have a look at the whole series of Dreamland Sessions over on our tumblr page. Do it, you might enjoy it.
As If My Thoughts Matter 