The New York Times reports on a new concert film from The Beastie Boys:
They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory.
[…] While perusing the message boards on the site one day in mid-2004, Mr. Yauch came across a concert photo snapped by a fan with his cellphone and found himself taken with the shakiness and rawness of the image. “The energy of it looked cool, and I thought it would look interesting to document a whole concert,” Mr. Yauch said.
Three days before the October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden, the Beastie Boys decided to go ahead. The band posted a notice on its Web site seeking volunteers. The instructions were simple: ” ‘Start it when the Beastie Boys hit the stage and don’t stop till it’s over,’ ” recalled one cameraman, Fred Zilliox, a 35-year-old cook from Keansburg, N.J. “Other than that, it was up to us to do whatever we wanted.”
The camera-toting fans took those instructions to heart. They shot the band, they shot the fans, they shot their fellow camera operators. Four even took their cameras along on their bathroom breaks.
Heh. Me being a child of the ’80’s, this sounded very familiar. In fact, it sounded almost exactly like what Bon Jovi did for their video for “Bad Medicine“:
For their “Bad Medicine” video the band invited fans to the video shoot, handed out additional video cameras for fans to keep, and collected the resulting footage at the end of the night, which was cut into additional footage shot by video director Wayne Isham.
Okay, sure, so the B-Boys did a full-length concert film and not just a five-minute music video, but still…. Everything old is new again.
(via Boing Boing)
“Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi from the album New Jersey (1999, 5:16).