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Tango Alpha Tango at Doug Fir — Description
July 2013.

Preface: I am a filmmaker as well as a photographer. My primary work is creating live music videos for Banana Stand Media, which you can see here: vimeo.com/bananastandmedia/vid… .

These pictures are stills from video I made for Tango Alpha Tango - the video can be seen here - vimeo.com/96134047

After having shot at Banana Stand for a few years, I began to get a tiny bit of buzz as a filmmaker of music content in Portland among people who make music. In July 2013, Louie, who runs Banana Stand, was contacted by Nathan from Tango Alpha Tango, who was looking to put together a shoot of their performance at the Doug Fir Lounge, which was also to have the audio recorded. Louie passed the info on to me, and I put together a team of myself and two of my friends, rented a few lenses, and voila, we had put together the first multi-camera live music shoot outside of the Banana Stand since we had begun shooting there about a year and a half prior. For the first time in awhile, I was managing the details of a paid gig - nothing extraordinary, but it got us enough pay to cover the rental cost of the lenses, as well as enough to buy some desperately needed new media cards for our operations at Banana Stand. As a producer, I've never been much of a go-getter, or a "die on the sword for the pay I deserve" type, as I have a full time job and am not a full-time freelancer who needs to get by doing gigs, so I asked for an amount I thought was fair and realistic for a band to pay out for a multi-man shoot and would cover what we needed for the shoot, and what we needed ourselves, at the time.

The shoot went well, other than the fact that I took pictures of the band who played prior to Tango Alpha Tango, changed my white balance setting to something other than what I had discussed with my shooters, and thus had to color-correct all of my footage independently of the rest of the footage. Worse yet, there was colored LED lighting that was always changing, so the color correction I had to do was always relative to the changing lighting, so I could really "blanket fix" it.

After the shoot, I found that there was another, fourth shooter, who was shooting DSLR as well for a local music news group - I grabbed his footage as well, after the show, and discovered that he also had a love for wrestling, like myself. I ended up becoming friends with him, and he became one of our full-time shooters at Banana Stand, which we really needed after one of our full-time guys moved to Arizona.