April 14, 2009

U2 Magnificent Video

Taken from The Inspiration Room:

U2’s track, “Magnificent”, from the 2009 album No Line on the Horizon, has been released as a music video, filmed live in The Somerville Theatre by Tom Krueger and edited by Duncan Shepherd at 89 Edit.

U2 Magnficient in Somerville Theatre Massachusetts

The video features U2 playing to a small crowd of 900 in an intimate venue in Davis Square, Somerville, just north of Boston, Massachusetts, on March 11, 2009. The show was the final night of U2’s ‘3 Nights Live’ US promo tour, broadcast live over national radio by FMQB Productions. Tickets to the concert were given out as prizes by Boston radio stations. Bono reference to “where it all began” links the performance back to the December 13, 1980 concert in Boston, attended by 150 people.

Credits

Filming was shot in Somerville by director/cinematographer Tom Krueger, who also directed “Original of the Species” for U2.

Krueger shot the video on eight HD CAM cameras and four HDV camcorders in a freewheeling experiment designed to harken back to the days of punk rock, resulting in a variety of interesting, ever-shifting camera angles.

Post production and effects were developed at Headlight, New York, by executive producer Steve Holiner.

Editor was Duncan Shepherd at 89 Edit with managing director Sharon Lew.

Shepherd and Krueger worked closely to choose a grade for each camera to achieve various sorts of bleach bypass looks, giving them a set of dailies similar to the type of graded dailies of a traditional, film-shot music video. The crew was able to tweak individual shots as they went along. In order to avoid the flat, unfilmlike finish that so often accompanies HD footage, Duncan edited the whole project on Final Cut Pro in HD format and used the program’s internal color correction to apply a more interesting look and feel to the dailies before commencing shot selection.

The process of editing the video was a watershed moment for 89, which was able to output a finished, uncompressed HD edit straight to the Smoke/Flame suite from a laptop using Final Cut Pro, rather than replicating all the work “online” at a later stage, saving time and money and allowing them to spend more time on digital cleanup. The crew found that, while there were still good reasons for editing many projects “offline” in SD, individual projects - like this U2 video - are ideally suited for editing with this new technology.

“Whether dictated by cost, time constraints, or simple creative realities, editors, directors and producers have a range of options open to them that previously were unrealistic or impractical,” noted 89’s Duncan. “The fact that all this power is available on set, or even in a field in the middle of Wyoming just shows that the way we’ve been editing all these years may be about to get a lot more fun. I wouldn’t say that I’ve made a total conversion yet, but, being a bit of a control freak, I like having the power to do the finish work, too, and this could get addicting.”






Lyrics

Magnificent
Magnificent

I was born
I was born to be with you
In this space and time
After that and ever after I haven’t had a clue
Only to break rhyme
This foolishness can leave a heart black and blue

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love can heal such a scar

I was born
I was born to sing for you
I didn’t have a choice but to lift you up
And sing whatever song you wanted me to
I give you back my voice
From the womb my first cry, it was a joyful noise…

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love can heal such a scar

Justified till we die, you and I will magnify
The Magnificent
Magnificent

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love unites our hearts

Justified till we die, you and I will magnify
The Magnificent
Magnificent
Magnificent

No comments:

Post a Comment