COURTESY : KURT WAGNER COURTESY : KURT WAGNER
CONCEPT RENDER : “ BEAMS FROM GROUND BOOMS AND BOLD COLOUR LOOKS CREATE VISUAL DEPTH AND MAKE THE SPACE APPEAR LARGER THAN IT IS .”
CONCEPT RENDER : “ ADDING IN THE STARS ALONG THE UPSTAGE BLACK DRAPE CREATES A SENSE OF DEPTH NOT YET SEEN .”
away from green or yellowish colours , and give her richer colours . Michael [ Bublé ] might be a little different where I can get away with a little bit more saturation , but I think it depends on the set , what your video content is , how many people on the stage you gotta light .”
“ When Jann walked into the room , she was very , very , very pleasantly surprised about the set and how beautiful it looked given that it was a warehouse ,” Brunton recounts . “ And Jann ’ s not a rock band or a punk band ; I think those kinds of acts can get away with being a little more edgy and raw , even in the production design . [ Jann ] is very elegant and glamourous , and that ’ s what we look for in her stage shows . So , to have that carry over into the livestream , it really spoke to everything that everyone works so hard for on the branding side for her .”
Now of course , when you ’ re dealing with audio as well as a myriad of cameras shooting a show , synchronization becomes a major consideration for keeping things running smoothly .
“ Anything that we ’ re doing with cameras , we had to do sync and timecode , and on the recording side of things that was a bit of a learning experience for us ,” explains Dakota Poncilius , audio tech at Gearforce as well as Arden ’ s monitor engineer . “ Figuring out how to not only have a Pro Tools rig chase timecode , but to have redundant Pro Tools rigs chase timecode was a bit of a hurdle we had to work out pretty quickly . And we were able to do that using [ Avid ] Sync I / Os , which are pretty old technology at this point . What we would do is , we would have LTC coming from the camera with timecode , and it would convert to MIDI timecode , which I would send to a MIDI splitter , which would split into two MIDI interfaces to two separate Pro Tools rigs .
“ We could ’ ve had shared I / O for the system , but to keep things as redundant as possible , we actually put a new analog split in between the two I / Os . So , if anything in my system crashed , [ Nevalainen ’ s ] recording would still go ; if anything in his system crashed , my recording would still go . The other thing with doing these broadcasts is that you ’ re trying to capture a live performance . You don ’ t want to have to be like ‘ Oh , hold on guys , Pro Tools crapped out !’”
This show , as well as the other streams produced by Gearforce , were hosted and streamed on a platform co-created by Nevalainen called Beatnik , which can be found at Beatnik . vhx . tv .
Ultimately , the show was a success for everyone involved , with Arden ’ s camp being especially grateful to put on as close to a full show as possible . “ We obviously pre-taped it and showed it later , but most of the audience thought it was live , thought it was at an actual venue , and the sound was phenomenal ,” says Brunton . “ We felt really great coming out of it . I ’ ve travelled with Jann for the past 17 years to every show , and she and I both came out of it feeling like it was a very quality experience .”
“ Everyone was so thrilled ,” according to Poncilius . “ There was a very cool moment where we were like , ‘ We did a show , holy shit . This is amazing ! We haven ’ t done this in almost a year now .’ There ’ s some camaraderie that goes along with it , working with the lighting folks , the video folks , the band . Not having been able to work with Jann for a while , then finally getting to do a show together , it was like ‘ We ’ re back at it again .’ It feels great .”
ROB NEVALAINEN
SCOTT MCPHEE
DAKOTA PONCILIUS
Over the last year and a half , it ’ s become apparent that livestreaming as a concert model can be one that is effective from both a performer and audience perspective , especially with the availability of high-quality producers
CHRIS BRUNTON for this kind of content that has only grown exponentially as companies and venues have been forced to adapt . As such , with audiences finally beginning to make a return , it ’ s finally time to consider whether or not livestreaming can continue to benefit artists and production houses , or if it was merely a temporary hotfix because there were few other options for people to perform .
“ Well , I think that streaming is going to be here ,” says Nevalainen . “ I think it ’ s one of the technologies that emerged out of necessity during the pandemic that will be here in some form after we emerge back into live performance ; mostly because people have been forced to explore other avenues to reliably deliver a high-definition product . For example , I think some artists might choose to do something like this for promo for an upcoming tour , they might do a 30-minute kind of sneak preview performance and broadcast that . I think there ’ s a good chance there ’ ll be video meet-and-greets for people that can ’ t physically be in the building . Quite often with meet-and-greets , you have to limit them purely because of space and time , whereas with video products , you don ’ t necessarily have to do that because you ’ re not under the same restraints .”
It ’ s also quite possible , Nevalainen adds , that in-person concerts could be livestreamed simultaneously . “ Because a lot of the practices that have been developed in the last 15 months have been tried and perfected , they ’ re pretty easy to deploy live now , especially if
28 | Fall 2021