I went to NYC's newest music festival, and it's the future of live music by Harrison Jacobs on Jul 28, 2016, 2:37 PM Advertisement
 I made the trek to Randall's Island in New York City this past weekend for Panorama Festival, the city's newest three-day music festival put together by Goldenvoice, the promoters behind Coachella. With temperatures topping 100 degrees and a lineup featuring big headliners like Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, and Kendrick Lamar, I expected the weekend to be 🔥 — both physically and performance-wise. The most noticeable part of the festival, however, was a structural addition I didn't expect to either notice or care about: the massive video screens attached to both the Panorama Stage (main stage) and the Pavilion Stage (second-largest stage). Here was my experience of Panorama festival and what impressed me the most: Here's a look at the screen at the Panorama Stage:  The Panorama Stage featured an LED screen that wrapped around the entire performance space and was 245 feet long and 36 feet tall, at the highest point, according to Kyle Casey, the Panorama festival director. The Pavilion stage, meanwhile, featured three screens. The one in the center was 32 feet wide and 18 feet tall, while the two screens on the side were 20 feet wide and 11 feet high.
Here's what the screens at the Pavilion Stage looked like:  This may seem like an odd thing to point out. Just about every large-scale concert, from festivals to amphitheater shows, has video screens to help the nobodies in the back see what the tiny figures in the distance are doing on stage. But, at Panorama, the screens seemed bigger. Not only that, what was being played on the screens seemed far more thought-out than at other shows and festivals I've attended. The cinematography of the artists' performances had a concert documentary-like quality. Those behind the booth seemed to always know where to place the camera to give a particular part of a song the emphasis it needed to drive it home. This suspicion was confirmed by Casey, who said that VER and BML Blackbird, the companies that provided the screens for the Panorama stage and the Pavilion stage respectively, collaborated with each artist's team to make sure their prepared video content meshed with the camera work provided by the companies. The more prominent artists, like the headliners and those playing just before, had their own personal video directors who called the shots and clearly knew the cues of each song.
 I never thought I would care about something like that. I usually make fun of the people staring at the video screens at a concert. Why go to a concert if you are going to just watch a screen? But at Panorama, the camera work was so visually interesting on its own — and the screens so massive — that I found myself constantly looking up at them whether or not my view was blocked. On top of that, many of the artists turned the video screens behind and around them into something approaching a video art piece that completely changed your experience of their performance. Sia tricked half the crowd into thinking Paul Dano, Kristen Wiig, and Tig Notaro were dancing on the stage. Arcade Fire displayed a slideshow of David Bowie photos while singing 2013's "Reflektor." The National and Oh Wonder layered the performance footage over abstract colors, patterns, and lines that mimicked the aesthetic on their album covers.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
| 
0 comments:
Post a Comment