Marseille on foot
I had a few hours to kill today before my flight back to Birmingham, so I wandered around Marseille this morning taking photos. Went to a market, down to the wharf and just around and about.
I had a few hours to kill today before my flight back to Birmingham, so I wandered around Marseille this morning taking photos. Went to a market, down to the wharf and just around and about.
I've spent the past four days working on a project in Marseille called Aftershock. It's the second one I've worked on - the first of which was in Genoa, Italy back in June.
Composer Nitin Sawhney brings together a group of musicians who have never met before from the UK, France and Italy. Over the course of a week, they write, workshop and rehearse a bunch of brand new songs - and it culminates in a one-off performance at the end of that week. This time, it was as part of the Marsatac music festival.
My role is with the website. I helped my friend Stef come up with the concept for the website, and we're trying out ideas, fine tuning it, and trying to put Aftershock online in an original way.
Instead of making a website about Aftershock - either as a brochure or some sort of flyer for the event, we decided that it was more interesting to follow the story of the musicians as characters. Most people would never get the chance to see backstage or to get to know the artists - and nor would they ever have the chance to see where that music comes from and how it develops.
So we put digital video cameras into the hands of the musicians and producers of the event, and it's been my job to take extra footage and bring together all of the material, make sense of it, and assemble it into something that makes some kind of sense.
Essentially, it involves tagging the video by artist name, song title, whether it's a rehearsal, performance, soundcheck - or just the musicians socialising. That's been some of the most interesting stuff: getting to know the real people behind the music.
It's a great experience, it's a really fascinating project and I've made some really good friends as a result of it. I'm considering making the website a compulsory text for my music industries students. It's a real antidote to the idea that the music business is about fame. We may be in a very cool part of the world - but the work's not entirely as glamorous as it may appear on first inspection.
The other thing I want to do with this site is to show people in the music industries how easy it is to make engaging content and put it online. The cameras we used range between £35 and £70 in value - and the website is made using Posterous (as is this site) - which enables you to post anything by email: text, mp3, video, photos and so on.
Have a look at the website. I still have lots more material to sort through and upload - but I'm really pleased with how it's shaping up.
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