Fellipe Salles’ “The New Immigrant Experience” Virutal Live Show (2021)
At the height of Covid-19, I was working at a production company that specialized in live music- mainly concerts and small-end festivals. I was hired due to my knowledge about livestream tech and during that time, I got to work with some really special artists to bring their vision to life for a virtual audience. So needless to say, Fellipe Salles’ award winning documentary “The New Immigrant Experience” was the perfect foundation to develop a type of live virtual event never seen before. “The New Immigrant Experience” in form is a musical documentary following the lives of immigrants in the modern era set to one of the most amazing Jazz compositions I’ve ever heard. When performed live, Salles has an orchestra that plays the composition over a seires of qued video clips that are triggered at certain moments in the composition.
It was my job to translate all of this into an experience worth watching over the internet as it’s original form was designed for an in-person audience. I was given total creative control as to how I would present this which allowed me flexibility in a way I hadn’t previously had at that job. Two things became clear to me:
- Transitions between the documentary video clips needed to fade seamlessly into our cameras following the orchestra so already the experience would feel more dream-like in nature.
- You could duplicate or even triplicate layers of the camera feeds we had and shift the opacity of multiple layers at once to create a collage like cascade of documentar, musicians, conductor, and whatever else we wanted.
Our team was also using this to test-pilot how powerful the, at the time, brand new Apple M1 chip so, in an attempt to push the machine to its limits, I developed a method of layering 4 copies of our set of 6 cameras into our livestream software to create this effect I was going for. (I learned then that a 5th layer of overlaping 1080p camera feeds was the limit for the M1 processor)
Needless to say, this was a tricky thing to nail even in a pre-recorded environment. But we had to pull this off completly live with only one rehearsal and I had to communicate over walkie talkie to three camera operators while doing this so I spent three weeks practicing this delicate dance for hours a day so that the live show would go off without a hitch.
The end result is something I’m very proud of, despite a little jank or occasional flub on choosing the right camera to take but for a completely live experience within the constraints I was under, I think I pulled off something really special.