Some of my recent work is now available on DVD. This project gathered actors and musicians to collaborate about the power of the people, not government, to shape and improve our lives and affect our history. The film features performances by actors and artists such as Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Viggo Mortensen, Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Bruce Springsteen, and John Legend.

The film is called “The People Speak”

The soundtrack from the film is 12 tracks of live original performances by Bob Dylan, Eddie Vedder and Bruce Springsteen, just to name a few. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Soundtrack available on iTunes music store.
Video available on HistoryChannel.com.

Here is the People Speak Trailer for the Film.

We taped the primary live portions in January of 2009 in Boston over a period of three days. I cant imagine how much work went into getting together this collaboration of so many talented and recognizable artists. The thought of all the phone calls, letters and emails between managers, agents, and publicists makes me dizzy. Not to mention all the arrangements involved with “riders” for the talent who require things a certain way if they are to be involved in a project away from home.

Needless to say all the elements came together for us to shoot a staged reading by celebrities of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Which included a live performance by John Legend that I am most fond of. As it was a taping of a live music performance there were some technical aspects we needed to provide. There were 2 separate sound mixing consoles, one for the audience and another for the TV mix. Both boards were Yamaha DM-1000 digital mixers which were very helpful for handling a variety of mixing and routing tools. The isolated tracks were recorded on two Fostex DV-824 DVD-RAM multitrack decks. Mixes and ISO’s were sent to all of the 7 camera’s as a redundancy, and to help the editors sync their footage together with the audio tracks.

One interesting detail was in the natural reverberation of the theater. This was an original vaudeville theater and opera house from the early 1900’s. Amplification was really not all that necessary as it was built before speakers were invented but we did utilize their state-of-the-art speaker system from their recent restoration. Careful attention was payed to the selection of microphones used to capture the voices of the performers and nothing else. But a little bit of “bleed” from the sound in the theater coming back into the microphone is inevitable. Watching and listening to the content we recorded sounds and looks beautiful, but when adding new content to the existing content, like more narration from the host and author Howard Zinn, the post-production audio mixers had to add some artificial reverberation to the cleanly recorded additional narration, in order to match the original audio. The result sounds quite nice but I can imagine the time it took to create an artificial reverb to match the sound of the Majestic Theater!

Check out the film and soundtrack and appreciate all the little things that got us to this point. I know I do!