BEYONCE | “Live at Roseland: Elements of 4”

August 2011

The Work

 

The Project

 

Live at Roseland: Elements of 4 is a video album by American recording artist Beyoncé. It was released on November 21, 2011 through Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records. The album features a concert film which was filmed during Beyoncé's 4 Intimate Nights with Beyoncé revue, held at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City between August 14–19, 2011.t was directed by Beyoncé, Ed Burke, and Anthony Green, and was executively produced by Beyoncé.

The Brief

 

While on the last day of a commercial shoot in New York City, my team received a call from director Anthony Green saying that he was about to shoot a series of four concerts for Beyonce, as well as a "Live Via Satellite" segment for the Michael Jackson Tribute Concert, on ten Red One Digital Cinema Cameras. Problem was: they were all on the ground at Off Hollywood and the team had no way of getting them to play nicely together. We needed to rig up those cameras, in addition to a couple of Canon 5D Mk IIs, and some Sony Cine Altas for a multi-cam shoot, then handle transcoding and moving into post-production all before the week was out.

The Results

 

Upon its release, the album charted on several international charts, topping the Dutch Music DVD chart, and peaking at number two on the US Top Music Videos, placing within the top ten in almost every European country. The standard edition of the album was certified gold, and the deluxe edition was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It was also certified platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and gold by the Polish Society of the Phonographic Industry (ZPAV).

The Process

 

My official title was "Post Media Supervisor" and after the firing of a crew member who snuck photos of Beyonce rehearsing added"On-Set Workflow Specialist" to my list of jobs. At the time, I specialized in on-set and post production workflows around the RED Digital Cinema Camera which was still considered new. My responsibilities included getting the cameras in sync with regard to their firmware, then set up to be the first 10-RED multi-cam shoot in history, make sure they interfaced with the other cameras on set, then back up and transcode all of the footage and get them into a timeline for the editors to take over. 

For 24 hours a day, 4 days in a row I was handling the cameras on set, backing up, and processing the footage for post-production and interfacing with both Beyoncé’s and Michael Jackson Estate teams. In the following months, I provided remote support to the production team on dealing with RED footage and the workflow we developed around it.

The Tech

 

The setup was pretty crude for a production of this caliber. We relied on a number of 17'' MacBook Pros and daisy chained LaCie FireWire drives for backups and transcoding. We used Red's suite of apps to transcode the footage into ProRes Proxies and moved the multi-cam timeline into a Final Cut Pro 7 project for editorial.

Credits

 

CLIENT: BEYONCE + MICHAEL JACKSON ESTATE

DIRECTOR: BEYONCE KNOWLES + ED BURKE + ANTHONY GREEN

EDITORS: ALEXANDER HAMMER + JEREMIAH SCHUFF + GEOFF ASHENHURST

RED WORKFLOW + POST MEDIA SUPERVISORS: ANDRE ELIJAH + MK SIU