A few weeks before I left Florida for Boston, I got the idea to record a little short about Derek and his trio at their usual Friday stomping grounds – Soya e Pomodoro, a cool little restaurant and lounge a few blocks from Derek’s place in downtown Miami. Derek’s trio consists of him on the keyboard, Brian Tate on the bass, and Dag Markhus on the drums. Lately the amazing Troy Roberts has been a fixture on saxophone and was playing the night we shot.
The idea was to create something short as a showpiece for Derek and the guys with interviews and performance footage. Unfortunately I was in a rush shooting Brian and Dag’s interviews so they look like crap, but Derek’s came out nice. We were there on a fantastic night for the group – they played an incredible show for the cameras.
Doug Klinger awesomely came down to Miami the night we shot this and provided his Canon XH-A1 which I’m operating on the right hand side. Doug is operating my little HVR-A1U. The different in the camera quality between the two makes for a really interesting contrast because we shot by lamp light and had the gain up on each. On the HVR-A1U it washes everything out which makes for some really cool tableaus. The XH-A1 handles it really well and we were able to get a nice golden color. The audio was recorded separately by a little doohickey Derek had.
I intentionally threw caution to the wind to create a funky look in terms of frame rates. Doug’s camera is running at 24p and mine at Sony’s fake Cineframe thing. FCP mixed them well on the timeline and then we spread it out to 30fps on the export to shake things up.
Originally Derek’s solo piece was the opener, but luckily we caught him off-guard while filming b-roll outside of Soya before the show. There was practically no one there at 9 when the show started, but two hours later it was standing room only.