Oxegen 2011 – Unforgettable

One of my favorite video projects to work on to date, we had the joy of getting up close to global megastars such as Black Eyed Peas, Foo Fighters and Coldplay at Oxegen.

Still, what materialized out of 3 days and 250GB of footage, was something a little more personal, and closer to home. My favorite shots are the high energy handheld crowd shots, in particular @ 0:31 mins.

Big shout out to the men who helped make this happen, my friends and collegues in Tiny Ark, Daniel Good, Richard Childs and Alex Delap. A lot of this rather special footage is down to them, their creative eye, and risk taking. It was a really exciting project to work on, managing a large amount of media, and working through the night to push it out within 48hours post-festival. As an editor I’m accustomed to having an organized workflow, but I must say, this was really tough to keep everything in place, making sure nothing was lost or overlooked, and optimizing my time by running both FCP 6 and FCP X on separate machines, achieving different tasks with both NLEs.

On a technical note, the slo-mo sequence was achieved with the built-in Optical Flow retiming feature in FCP X, on 60/25p Sony PMW-EX1 footage. We had been looking at Twixtor and Motion Optical Flow for a while, but were amazed at the render time in FCP X. Even though FCP X is getting a lot of bad press at the moment, I reckon it’s worth it even if all I ever use it for is retiming footage with OF!

Shot on Canon 5D mkII and Sony PWM-EX1.