Blue Fire Street Festival is a free open-air intercultural arts festival in Dublin’s Historic Smithfield Square. The event has plenty of food, music and dance from the different cultures that Smithfield locals represent. It’s great craic and a very friendly atmosphere as it’s almost run by volunteers.
Project Background
The Blue Fire team needed a simple highlights video to celebrate their event afterwards. They would also use the video to support funding applications for the following year. The brief was to capture festival attendees having fun, tasting food, dancing and singing along to the bands on stage. The audience would be the general public as well as funding decision makers. This meant the video had to be polished but exciting, communicating the atmosphere of the day and potential for larger future street festivals.
The challenges were weather – it was an open air festival, the weather was nice and sunny on the day though. Another challenge was capturing every element of the event at moments when the crowd was biggest and the most engaged with the given activity. Throughout the day the crowd would change as people passed through Smithfield Square.
Concept Development
We researched other festivals and saw how they marketed themselves. We boiled the brief down to prioritise ‘happy smiley people having fun’ – joyful, engaged people would stand as visual testimonials to the success of the event. This is common across a lot of events such as conferences, concerts and festivals. We would capture wide shots of set pieces up and down Smithfield, then look for people having fun around those spots to capture moments of joy in slow motion in a run and gun style, always moving around following sounds of cheering or laughing.
This strategy meant video viewers would see an overview of the festival attractions as well as the attendee’s genuine reactions to the festival. This aligned with Blue Fire Street Festivals goals in terms of wider audience engagement and funding bodies, seeing how the general public interacted with the event.
Pre-Production
Blue Fire Street Festival sent us a schedule of events for the day. We prepared for bad weather just in case and packed a single camera, zoom lens, neutral density filter (to better control light in the bright daylight), an audio recorder and shotgun microphone. On the day we would briefly interview the Festival Director for a brief overview of the events.
Production
We filmed everything in slow motion, 60fps, except the Festival Director’s Interview which was filmed in 25fps. We packed a small LED light in case the street became too dark at night and to help light the interview. The festival ran into the night, but the band stage had plenty of lights.
Post-Production
The editing style we went with was fun, bubbly and largely in time with the music we chose, to emphasise the family and community atmosphere and go along with all the smiles and laughs we had captured. In terms of sound design we had some on-camera audio and in the interview. Since we had not brought a separate sound recordist, we did not have as rich a variety of sound to work with in post as we might have liked, so the final sound was simply our stock music choice and the Director’s interview. This is very common for highlights videos, but we would always recommend that a separate sound recordist is included in the budget for an event like this, or a second videographer or assistant who can also help record environmental sound.
Our colour grade used heavy saturation, to make all the colours of various flags, costumes, face paints and food pop. Our editors also used the Blue Fire Street Festival’s logo as a closing graphic, for better brand awareness.
Execution Details
Idiosync had one week to complete the video after the festival, which was very achievable since the edit itself was very simple. We used one videographer and one video editor. The Festival’s budget was limited but we were very flexible as it was a fun event and we knew some of the bands playing at the band stand and had fun filming them at the end of the night. It was an all round very relaxed festival and a friendly and warm atmosphere so a joy to film.
Results and Impact
The key deliverable was a ~3 minute highlights video in landscape 16×9 full high definition. We offered a square option also for social media channels. The video was initially released but is now offline and was later used in funding applications for the following year. The festival was very supportive and complimentary of our work so we are looking forward to working with them again at the next Blue Fire Street Fest!
Lessons Learned
The key challenge of this shoot was capturing as much of the festival as possible and as many smiling faces as possible to help pack the video with a sense of joy and engagement. We shot run and gun style with minimal equipment to make sure we could move easily across the Square to catch little moments of laughter, dance etc.
This project was a success because the festival itself was such a success, with plenty of community and family presence, there were plenty of things and people to film on the day.
Conclusion
Idiosync delivered true value for Blue Fire Street Festival with hard graft – by staying present on the Square all day and night, with plenty of batteries and memory card space, we made sure not to miss a moment of festival fun. Our client now has a fantastic video showcasing their successful event, to help raise funds and promote future events.
Lessons
We really would recommend at least a second videography with a small shotgun mic attachment for their camera to capture all the various sounds of a festival like this – music, singing, laughter, cheering and food cooking. Environmental sound effects would have really boosted this video and presented more editing opportunities, so we will take this lesson on board for future projects.