As well as shooting numerous music promo's, and my continuing work with Nick Hudson, I was also invited to shoot Supernormal Festival, in Oxfordshire.
Supernormal is based at a lovely destiniation called Braziers Park, and is run almost completely voluntarily. Unlike many other music festivals, Supernormal focusses less on showcasing commercial acts, and more on bands and artists that devide the line between music, performance and art.
The result is a very intimate affair where all artists and musicians mingle freely with the audience.
I applied to play at the festival earlier this year, as my band takes on this exact same approach by creating narrative films to play live while I perform. I applied too late sadly, so I was stoked when I was invited to shoot the event instead.
I was interested, not only in shooting the live music acts that were performing, but also the art installations, shows and demonstrations that took play over the weekend. I also wanted to splice all of this footage into the shots I took of the bands that were playing.
The idea was to paint a picture of what the festival stands for and to re-create the feel of the event in a way that isn't force feeding you information, like an average documentary would.
I tried this approach once before when I filmed my friends in the band Code500 last year at the Northampton Umbrella Fair. That was very much an experiment though, despite being quite successful. I really wanted to push this approach more this time around.
Unfortunately, three days was a little too much for my camera to handle and I started running out of space on my memory stick's, so I had to cull certain footage, and in some cases had to just not film certain events. This was frustrating and will definitely be taken on board as something to improve upon next time.
And there will be a next time, as they've kindly invited me back next year :)
Anyway, here are the films that were created during the three days.
I will probably be putting together a final cut comprising all of these films soon, including the other footage I haven't used yet. But as stand alone films, I think you get a good idea of how it feels to be at the festival.
It was tremendous fun, and hopefully I'll be allowed back next year to push this style of filming even more.
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