Last night I filmed an intimate concert in my buddy Steve’s living room. Steve has come to the end of a very long road and in an effort to drum up some finishing funds for his documentary film he has started this Living Room Series of concerts.  This evening was his first.  The artists that played were Evan Slamka of Square on Square, formerly Marjorie Fair, and Kent Hutchison, of Cue The Moon, the band which Steve is also the drummer of.

I began shooting around sunset and in a matter of an hour there was no light to be had.  The first musician performed by candlelight so I had a very limited amount of angles.  I boosted the ISO all the way to the top and just embraced the raw quality of all the noise it added.  My only hope for any kind of exposure at one point was a window across the way at the neighbors house with the light on.  If I framed the artist in that window I could get a bit of a silhouette.  It was an interesting challenge to try to get a variety of shots with that window as my only light.  I also had fun with my lensbaby, a lens I rarely have reason to pull out but one that I was really enjoying last night.

There was also this guy there, Jerry Kochendoefer, a friend of the band and a funny personality.  You can hear his conversation from almost anywhere in the house and he’s usually telling some wild story.  Anyways, he got a little tipsy and took over the stage for awhile.  He was so funny I decided to videotape him as well.

Steve’s documentary is an amazing film about people and improvisational music.  It started as a 10 minute documentary that he made for school and two years later he decided to pick up where he left off and traveled the world to follow a select group of artists that were doing something interesting with music and sound.  Here’s Steve’s direct description from his teaser on vimeo.

“The film, which explores the lives of individuals from different parts of the world using music for wildly unorthodox investigations, features Miya Masaoka, a Japanese koto player using music to interact with plants and insects; Jon Rose, the world’s first virtuoso fence player, who has traveled the world to make music from fences in conflict zones ranging from the Australian outback to Israel to the US-Mexico border; John Luther Adams, an ecologist using music to study weather patterns, earthquakes, and activity of the aurora borealis in Alaska; and Bob Ostertag, who explores socio-political issues through processes as diverse as transcribing riots into string quartets, and creating live cinema with garbage.”

Also for more info you can check out his blog for the film.

I should warn you there is swearing at the very end of the video below.

Enjoy!