All I Ever Wanted is a documentary about the band The Airborne Toxic Event and their historic night at the Walt Disney Concert hall in December of 2009. It isn’t very often that a rock band gets a chance to play at the prestigious Hall so Wheelhouse Creative’s Brian Girard and Jon Danovic set out to capture the group as they prepared for this unique event.

I am fascinated with music, so it was great for me to watch these talented musicians craft a show from behind the scenes. What I really liked about this film was that it did a great job of creatively blending the behind the scenes footage with the live event.  This really helps paint a picture of what it takes for a show like this to come together. It’s a wonderful documentary to watch, but finding out how it all came together is what really impressed me.

West Coast / Left Coast concert series

From November 21st through December 8th, 2009, The Los Angeles Philharmonic assembled a three-week series of concerts and special events that focuses on California as a land of possibility, a place where creative renegades have enjoyed a wide open and welcoming environment.  The LA Philharmonic invited The Airborne Toxic Event to play in the series, which sparked interest from other East Side area musicians like, the Calder Quartet, Lalo Guerrero School of Music at Art in the Park Choir and Belmont High School Marching Band. It was this celebration of East Los Angeles Culture that attracted Wheelhouse Creative’s producer Brian Girard and director Jon Danovic.

Documenting…with restrictions

Documenting the concert was going to be no easy task for Wheelhouse Creative.  The event was being held at The Walt Disney Concert Hall and the prestigious venue has heavy restrictions for filming concerts. It was clear that they had to come up with a simple solution to help capture the event, while giving the look that they wanted.

About a month prior to the concert, Jon and Brian were given a walk-through of the Disney Hall and they were greeted with the question, “…you guys aren’t going to be filming the night of the concert, are you?” It’s not a question that you want to hear with only a few weeks until the shoot.

Luckily, Jon brought his Canon 7D to the walk-through and pointed out that it was the type of camera that they would be using on the night of the event.

The Disney rep asked, “…what about the rig – the tripod?”

Brian replied, “That’s it. It’s just a human being and a camera…maybe a slightly bigger lens.”

He went on to explain that everyone would be completely mobile and that there would be no wires, cables or anything restricting the movement of the operators – effectively giving an answer to every possible reason that Disney had for not being able to shoot. They pointed out that they only required a small space for each of the 9 camera operators and that was all that they needed from the Hall. Once the Disney representative realized that this wouldn’t be an ordinary video shoot with ordinary gear, they allowed Wheelhouse access.

With that small crisis averted, Brian and Jon realized that some challenges were still ahead. Jon would not be able to view all of the cameras in real-time during the night of the event. He had to rely on planed placement of the crews and on their instincts to record the concert as it happened.  In fact, the crew didn’t even have a rehearsal for the event.  Aside from a brief sound check, the 9 camera operators captured the event as it unfolded for the audience. This completely untainted viewpoint actually worked in Wheelhouse’s favor by delivering an experience to the DVD audience that was as close to the live performance as possible.

“I definitely think that because of the Canon technology, because we were not forced to be tethered to anything…that’s how we were able to make this happen. Otherwise, because of the restrictions of Disney Hall, we wouldn’t have even been able to walk in the door.” Brian Girard.

The Canon 7D’s gave Wheelhouse the ability to have the look and depth of a 35mm film camera without the restrictions of a film camera or video camera of similar quality. The small form factor of the Canon 7D played into the “run and gun” style of the documentary that the company was looking to accomplish, while still keeping a nice cinematic look and feel to the project. This also helped capture the moments of creativity leading up to this unique stage show, without becoming too obtrusive to the band as they prepared for the event.

Technical camera details

Most of the cameras were outfitted with Canon 70mm-200mm IS lenses. The camera that was focused on the singer was using a Canon 100-400 lens and the two that were running around backstage were using Canon 24mm-105mm lenses.  All of these lenses mentioned are full-frame lenses and therefore had a small crop factor on the Canon 7D camera. Jon and the DPs set the ISO of the cameras to 2000 and they were pulling an F/4 on most of the cameras.  Jon originally wanted to keep the ISO under 1500 but the two DPs that were hired insisted that 2000 ISO was the way to go. The final footage doesn’t show any signs of increased noise at that ISO level.

The L Series IS lenses (the 70-200 and the 100-400) uses an on-board stabilization system which eliminates the need for a tripod. That’s right, you heard me…no tripods. Jon and Brian did say that three of the cameras were using monopods but after watching the screener I was sure that all of the cameras were on sticks. The stabilization in the IS lenses did not degrade or soften the image and gave the 9 camera operators the ability to move around to capture what they needed.

The cameras have a noted flaw in that they can only record in 12 minute increments. In order to get around this, Jon broke the team into two groups – group 1 and group 2. In between each song, Jon stopped down the groups, one at a time in order to keep a continuous record. This made a problem for syncing later, but it allowed for a continuous record for the project.

Post production

As you can imagine The post production plan began early for All I Ever Wanted. They did not have the time and luxury of storyboarding the documentary footage, which amounted to over 100 hours of raw material, so they had to rely on building the story on the timeline. To put the post production timeline into perspective, the concert was on December 4th and Island Def Jam was asking to see a first-cut on January 20th. This was a very tight schedule and Brian and Jon didn’t have time for any trouble with the edit system.

They knew that they would have to transcode all of the H.264 material from the Canon 7D cameras and they were hoping to edit the documentary with Final Cut Pro. So they began some initial tests by transcoding to the ProRes standard codec (147 Mbit/s.) However, the response times on their Apple 8-core systems proved to be a challenge for their work-flow. In order to keep with their deadline they would have to view all of their cameras in real-time on playback.  That meant up to 12 streams of footage at a time in some cases.  They then tried ProRes Proxy as an alternative but they were still having issues with playing back multi-cam clips on Final Cut.  They could get up to four to play in real time, but beyond that they were having issues.

Avid saves the day

In the interest of time, Jon moved the project over to an Avid system and transcoded the footage to the DNXHD 36 codec.  The smaller bitrate allowed them to view 12 streams of video in real-time.  This fixed one problem but Jon was then left with hundreds of hours of footage that happened to be un-synced. Without having matching timecodes among the cameras or using a slate for production, Jon had to match the cameras manually in post. He mentioned that it was more time-consuming than it was difficult, but he simply went “one song at a time,” syncing the footage first, then editing. Jon began with the concert footage, then they went back and added the behind the scenes footage to fill in the gaps and start telling the story. Soon they were “flying through footage at lightning speed,” and in the end, they could play the full feature on a timeline with live color effects and 12 multi-cam streams running all at once for the full movie.

Upon completion, the original plan was to on-line the final timeline by performing an up-resolution of the original footage to a heftier codec.  To the group’s surprise, the tests didn’t produce a noticeable difference compared to the DNxHD 36 codec that they had been working with for the edit.  The Wheelhouse Creative team said, “The bottom line is that everyone has their own workflow, and with the variables at hand for us, we felt this worked best for us.”

DVD release

All I Ever Wanted captured my attention from the first frame of the film and held it until the very end. More so than just watching a creative piece, though, I felt connected to the group. I had the feeling that I was watching a concert develop before my eyes and I felt that I was getting an intimate look at what it takes a band to prepare for an event like this. It does a great job of showing off the musical ability of the group, which happens to be so much more than what you would expect a rock band to be.

All I Ever Wanted is set to be released on September 28th and if you’re interested in watching a well-crafted documentary, you don’t have to look any further. Beyond the story, however, it’s fascinating to watch the technical achievements that Brian and Jon accomplished with the Canon 7D cameras. It’s a wonderful documentary that you definitely shouldn’t miss.