My first job was for the 5-person group All About Buford: Two women, three men, with one of them bi-coastal (Wes Carroll). Wes would be present only for one day of what amounted to a 4-5 day shoot. The song was cool: a moody piece of sensual folk-pop that I responded to immediately. The two women were covering the lead vocals and harmony vocals. The guys? Well, one was doing the bass line, and the other was the vocal percussionist. While vocally simulating a rhythm section is laudable and impressive, it does not exactly look <em>appealing</em> on video. The percussionist must purse lips, puff up, cover his mouth, and in short, perform every facial contortion possible to give his performance the full kit sound. At some point he needs to breathe, too. Also, in the context of dramatically stylizing the song for video, what role can the vp play? The bass singer presented a similar challenge, but he had a middle eastern-flavored chant in the middle of the song, which by default gave him some solo screen time. Fortunately, the percussionist was handsome, and even just placing him in the scene as furniture would've been enough.
For both jobs, I found it necessary to re-arrange the personage to make it more visually pleasing than a live performance might be. Suddenly, I was putting the bass singer in a corner with the percussionist, the harmony singers in another, and the lead gets front and center. It occurred to me that this was somewhat pandering to the conventional "bands with instruments" thing but as an outsider looking in, I found this logical. A cappella is by nature a very bare-bones approach, and each member within the group is usually intrinsically talented and perhaps not accustomed to the time-honored pretensions and posturing of the rock bands and pop acts of the world. The question I faced was therefore, do I honor that and show that faithfully or do I try to modify it for the visual medium?
I chose the latter, and perhaps in doing so inadvertently gave some respect to the whole endeavor. A cappella gets a bad rap too often, and our collective impressions of it are most likely outdated. We see barbershop quartets; we hear Manhattan Transfer standards. But there is a smattering of progressive stuff out there too, as with the acts I had dealings with. I felt the talent was there to justify raising the expectations of a video capturing a singing group in this genre, and not succumbing to the preconceptions. For lack of a better expression, I chose to treat it as "real" music.
{mosimage}Michael Bilotta is a musician, producer and videographer in the Boston area. His newly-launched company, Shibboleth Pictures, is available for video production of all types, but specializes in music video. He received a degree in songwriting from Berklee College of Music, and has produced several CDs and videos, including his own. He has produced videos for vocal bands All About Buford and Chapter 6. His website has clips of both of these bands, and other projects as well.
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