Pianist Chick Corea celebrated his 60th birthday by playing New York's legendary Blue Note. But “the jazz capital of the world” is actually quite tiny. Corea would have had trouble fitting just his musician friends into the club.
So he booked the Blue Note for three solid weeks this past December, playing 38 sets in all, with a cast that changed every two nights.
New York's Colossalvision was there each night, taping sets with Panasonic's variable frame rate AJ-HDC27V camcorders. That adds up to more than 70 hours of concert footage. With five 27Vs, this project used the largest concentration of the cameras so far.
It was a tight squeeze between the tables and the stage for the shooters, many of whom employed the EasyRig2 to distribute camera weight off the shoulders — welcome relief for such a marathon shooting schedule. The Swedish-made device arcs a support beam from a vest and hip belt over a cameraperson's back, and this connects to the camera with a suspension line and shock absorber.
“When it's done, it'll look like a movie, not a TV show,” says Colossalvision director/DP/designer David Niles. Niles is also serving as the production's editor, director, and co-producer. Also co-producing are Jon and Peter Shapiro. Both have substantial experience in the musical realm — they produced the recent IMAX film All Access. Bennett-Watt HD Productions of Issaquah, Wash., also pitched in with production help.
Colossalvision set up a control room in one of the club's closet-sized dressing rooms — next to the musicians' dressing room and across the skinny hall from the public bathrooms. In addition to the AJ-HDC27V camcorders' DVCPRO100 tapes, the show was also switched live and fed to VTR.
Niles manned a Snell & Wilcox HD1010 switcher, barking moves into shooters' headsets like a football coach. This preliminary shot selection will make the task of shuttling through the miles of tape less daunting.
Niles does not envision this project as a standard live-music documentary; he wants to paint a full human portrait of Corea and his many friends, filming “people being people in New York City” to augment the live jazz footage.
Like the video, audio from the concerts was captured using some of the most advanced technology available today. Hyperium Studios of Torrance, Calif., set itself up in an administrative office to record 16 direct stream digital (DSD) tracks using a 1604 console from API. DSD, which serves as the basis of Super Audio CD (SACD), directly records a 1-bit representation of the audio waveform produced by 2.8224MHz sampling. This adds up to about 64 times the resolution of standard CD-DA.
Aside from 5.1 surround work for a future DVD of the concert series, Hyperium is also planning an SACD release.
