Producing a Crowdfunding Video - Pacific Quartet Vienna

One might think by reading my recent video production blog post about the “New Piano Trio”, that I somehow specialize in classical music video shoots and films here in Austria since this blog post is also about another great group of classical musicians: The “Pacific Quartet Vienna” (PQV). But that’s not the case; I’m just a lucky filmmaker! Fortunately as a working cameraman, editor and videographer here in Vienna (Austria) I sometimes have the privilege and honor of being hired by other artists to shoot and edit their video projects in order to showcase their extraordinary skills.

Filming testimonials for PQV's crowdfunding video

PQV needed a crowdfunding video to showcase their expertise and fund the production of their debut CD. They first contacted me already with an extensive and well thought-out CD concept that would have been great to produce and film if we had plenty of pre-production time, shoot, and edit days here in Vienna. This obviously wasn’t the case so we needed to somehow filter the concept down to the very essence of their message in order to fit it into a video format and length short enough for me to film, edit and satisfy people’s short concentration span online.

Still not sure if they wanted to shoot and include such things as interviews, concerts and excerpts into their video, it proved to be a fun challenge to film and edit the quartet’s individual ideas into one final video concept. During our first video production talk, PQV’s differences in ideas and video concepts allowed my production team and I flexibility in terms of storytelling.

One special trait about the constellation is that each member comes from a different country (Japan, Switzerland, Hungary, Taiwan), so different ideas and mindsets about how the final video and edit should look like was also just as varied. An idea we had and implemented for the video in order to use their multi-cultured background to our advantage was to film each member speaking in their native tongue instead of shooting them speaking one common language. This also helped each member feel a bit more at ease while speaking in front of the camera.

Once again we had a big room with boring white walls to film the video (same as with NP3’s teaser video), luckily this time there was a small library in the corner of the room that allowed the final video and interviews to have a bit of depth while filming. We shot the video at the Essl Museum, which is a sweet little museum a bit outside of Vienna (in Klosterneuburg).

Wide shot of the quartet at the Essl museum

I wanted to film their individual interviews in a dynamic way with two cameras in order to have a bit of flexibility while editing. So I had the main camera static on a tripod and another camera slightly to the side on top of the Edelkrone slider plus pro. Our second cameraman on set Francisco Falcão was controlling the slider. This allowed the B-Camera to have a parallax movement to it while filming, so editing back and forth between the two camera angles made the final video a bit more dynamic for the viewer.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to shoot any B-roll at the museum. Ulrich Wagner recorded the music played in the video simultaneously while we were filming the video, so a lot of stuff during the video production had to be juggled and taken into consideration at the same time on set. Luckily the quartet had a photo shoot the next day in the streets of Vienna, so I used that opportunity to tag along with my camera and film some behind the scenes. This allowed me to use a few excerpts of the photo shoot as B-roll shots in the final edit of the crowdfunding video.

As a side note, I’m well aware that shooting the video and recording the music at the same time isn’t by any means the ideal way of filming something of the sort. Especially since many takes of the same songs are necessary while filming, and syncing the video with the audio in the editing suite is a nightmare this way. However we didn’t really have a choice, PQV is an extremely talented and busy quartet with a full agenda playing around the globe. So they had to squeeze as much production into their few “free days” together as possible.

I’m quite proud of the final outcome, it was a great group effort on everyone’s side. PQV was able to reach their crowdfunding goal and they can now produce, market and release their debut CD the way they originally intended. And I’d like to think that the final video helped them (at least in a small way) to showcase their talents and achieve that crowdfunding goal.

You can see the final video below: