Billie Jean

I was very fortunate to meet Sam Nitsch back in October of 2023 after seeing him perform. After his show, I went up to compliment his set that night and we struck up a conversation. He mentioned that he was looking for some representation on his socials of his live performances since the majority of his posts were of other things he was doing with his music. I offered that it would be cool to work with him if that was something he was seriously considering, and we exchanged contact info. 

Sam has a very specialized talent when it comes to his performances. He is the only performer in his "band." Nothing is prerecorded, and everything is done live. Using a wide array of instruments and a 12-track loop pedalboard, he builds up from a simple beat to a full backing track of a song in around 2 minutes. This is a very niche
way of creating music which I feel also sets him apart in the local Rochester scene - that as well as his electric violin. As he builds up his songs, you will always find someone in the audience trying to guess what song he is creating before the full melody is revealed. It turns into a fun game that he plays with his audience, and you can definitely tell that he enjoys having this connection with his crowd.

After about a month of planning, we chose a night in the beginning of December to record at Mulconry's Irish Pub in Fairport, NY since this was a popular gig location of his with a predictable crowd for each time he performed there. Between the two of us, we had six cameras dotted around the venue to try and capture an array of different shots. I wanted to play with different dynamic shots throughout the night, and I had a feeling my camera would be doing a lot of the heavy lifting - especially with all the other cameras being stationary. As the bar started to fill in before his set started, we tested the sound and different camera angles and hoped that everything would turn out good for when I started working on all the footage in post. I had never recorded a live performance at this scale before, so it was an understatement to say that I was a little nervous going into this. He was a little nervous too since he never had a film crew before, but I think those shared nerves brought out a fantastic result from the both of us.

I filmed his entire three hour set... or as much as I could before the cameras all started to die. One by one, they started to power down, even with the extra batteries we brought. The only song I didn't fully grab was his encore for the night: I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers. I'm a little glad that this was the case though so I could fully enjoy seeing him give it his all. The patrons were singing along at the top of their lungs, the bar staff were swinging the small chandeliers above the counters, it was an awesome moment to wrap up an amazing night.

Looking at all the footage about a week later (once we were able to share the almost 160 gb of content between the two of us), we decided on having me edit together Billie Jean for him since that had some of the best sound. I am thankful for the amount of cameras that we had in the bar. Having the ability to change between the shots and match them in interesting ways to the music gave me the freedom to try many different approaches of putting this together. With only working with scripted content to make music videos up to this point, I wanted to experiment with different techniques to add more intrigue to "storytelling". The use of overlay in this project is the main result of this, and I feel having that double exposure effect in a lot of the shots really gave the video a different sense of fullness. After a couple of drafts back and forth, we landed on this final version. 

I am proud of the way this turned out, and I hope that Sam is too. I hope that we get a chance to work together on another project again in the future.