Another Episode Complete!
Thank you to everyone who came to our Overture Center premiere last weekend. It was such an honor to share our hard work with all of you.
One of my favorite parts of the event was during one of the interview segments in the episode, hearing someone lean over to their friend and murmur “Oh, I didn’t know that!”. This is why we do what we do - not only sharing the music of Madison and Wisconsin on a national scale, but also allowing the audience to peek behind the curtain to understand how these artists and venues have gotten to where they are.
The Overture Center episode was the most challenging to edit for a variety of reasons.
First, our 10-foot jib camera, which delivers dramatic sweeping shots of the artists and venues, developed the shakes early on in the shoot resulting in most of the footage being unusable. The editing team (Peter Allen and myself) painstakingly poured through all of the footage, trying to salvage every usable shot we could. No kidding - the jib shots that you see in the Overture Center episode are all the jib shots we had.
Second, since this was a closed shoot, we allowed the artists to re-run sections of a song to be spliced in later into a final cut. This was our first time trying this approach, and I can confidently say, our last. The result of this is that we were unable to sync most of the clips to the edited audio using our editing software, resulting in us having to do it manually. Peter and I spent days in the editing booth debating whether Greg’s finger/foot hit the key slightly before or after the audio. I can sing all of these songs in the episode from memory now!
This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all of the work required to make each episode possible, and the majority of it is done on a volunteer basis by the From the Front Row creators. We love what we do, and are so fiercely proud of this project. It makes all of the effort worthwhile to package the final copy of the episode, and present it to viewers like you.
On to the next episode, and our national feed date next Summer!
Claire
