#tyrarock

Last weekend, I attended, performed and shot footage of Tyrärock, a small rock festival held at the Suutarinkylä schoolhouse, a few kilometers outside of potato capital of the world, Tyrnävä, Finland.

my god, it’s full of potatoes

In addition to many photos of endless potato fields, I shot a lot of footage of the groups and bands and solo performers (including myself), and I edited it all together in a short 23 minute documentary to celebrate the festival’s 25th anniversary. The video is below, and if you’re interested in how I put it together, all that information follows. If not, enjoy the video and let me know what you think.

Video production notes:

The video was shot primarily with two cameras, a Sony HDR-SR11 Handycam and a Nikon D3300 DSLR. I also shot a little footage and took some photos with my OnePlus 3 (mainly because it can shoot in super HQ 4K). I recorded the second and third song of each performance with the Sony atop a tripod, trying to find a sweet spot to shoot the whole thing. Because the size of the bands changed, and people weren’t always standing in the same spot, I figured a “whole stage” video would be a nice baseline video, from which I could add in complementary footage shot from the Nikon and the OnePlus. 

Not an ideal camera placement

I showed up to the festival hours and hours early with all the gear necessary to record the whole night’s performances straight from the mixer to my computer. However, the sound engineer told me that was unnecessary as he was multitrack recording everything. The next morning, he told me he had been too busy to record. So the sound in this video comes from two sources: the Handycam onboard microphone (which produced a lot of noise when the wind was blowing), and a cheap dynamic microphone I used when shooting the interviews. 

The final song played in the video is not actually from Tyrärock, because all the songs played in the All-Night Jam Band were covers, and I didn’t want to step on any legal toes. I used a Creative Commons song by the Catnips that I found on Archive.org, and then I added in some reverb and processing to make it sound more like the live performances.

I cheated a little on my own performance. 

I couldn’t hear the guitar on stage, not well anyway, and I wasn’t super-confident that anyone in the audience was hearing my guitar either. The video shot of that performance confirmed my fears. My wife told me that you could hear the guitar, until I started caterwauling up there. So I dubbed a recording of me playing along with myself, just to make the guitar stand out more against my voice. But it’s not like I’m up there playing Yngwie Malmsteen; they’re mostly open chords.

I had a little trouble with the editing, because my performance was chopped up into a bunch of videos (I played early in the day, and my assistant wasn’t paying attention when I told him NOT to do that.) 

“Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

But also, I didn’t have time to man two cameras, so the Handycam was on full auto most of the time, and I’m not the world’s greatest cameraman, so I got some bad footage with the Nikon. The OnePlus, however, shot pretty great-looking video all the time. 

The biggest headache for me was the titles. I haven’t done many titles in the past, but the contrast of colors and movement of the video made any captions or titles really hard to see, and I didn’t want to spend 100 years figuring out how to do it beautifully on Premiere Pro, so I just blurred the background and put white text over it. It works here, but next time, I’m coming prepared.

A final note on the name of the production “company.” 

Like the poor bastards responsible for Boaty McBoatface, I appealed to the Internet for the best name, and once I read “Your Mom is a Space Hooker,” I couldn’t get it out of my head. I don’t know if I’ll make more videos under that production name, but I love it.

On July 12, I played a short set of acoustic songs at Tyrärock, a free rock festival held every year in Tyrnävä, Finland. As always, "Iron & Steel" was everyone's favorite song, so I've uploaded a video of the performance.