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Behind the Scenes with Nur-D at The Hewing
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This one’s got a bit of history…
Last year, I almost saw Nur-D perform at The Hewing.
It was before I got to finally see him at On The One, so up to that point I hadn’t seen him perform at all yet. Around that time, my mom had been taking us to just about every summer festival she could find. She knew I’d been wanting to see Nur-D live since I had become a fan of him through the Minnesota Book Awards, and his music was something I wanted to share with them, too. So, one of her summer plans was for us to catch his performance at The Hewing Hotel.
Unfortunately, her plan on that particular day was a little ambitious.
Before the concert, she wanted to make a whole day of it. We visited the Bachmans garden for an Art Festival, ate at Gyu-Kaku and then went to see Shakespeare in the Park, which on paper sounded simple enough. The summer heat was intense, and to make matters worse, it was difficult to actually appreciate what seemed like a funny performance because the actors performed off-stage…just in front of the amphitheater, which meant we could barely hear anything.
By the time it was over, we were exhausted. We also hadn’t actually bought the tickets to The Hewing performance yet. In the end, we decided to go home and rest. I was frustrated with the turn of events, but at the same time I felt particularly tired, and the rest was needed. I’d just have to wait for Nur-D’s On The One Music Festival performance to see him live.
Now, a year later, Nur-D hired Skull Dogs Media to film this year’s performance at The Hewing Summer Concert Series.
This was the photo I found on the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Band’s Instagram.
Photo Taken by Tori Philippi, Studio Woah
In order to prepare, and get a general idea of what to expect, I looked up photos of the venue and was surprised to find the rooftop of The Hewing Hotel had a pool…right in the middle of everything. The rooftop itself was already pretty small, with Nur-D performing in a corner. There wouldn’t be much room to squeeze between the pool and where he’d be performing and that was before the audience arrived.
When JP brought us up to the rooftop, where Nur-D was already doing the sound check, we had a chance to get a better feel for the space and figure out how we wanted to handle the shoot. The Rooftop itself was beautiful, with a gorgeous view of a chunk of the Minneapolis City Skyline and a very interesting view of the back of The Hewing sign. The space was tight and intimate, a far cry from the space at the Taste of Minnesota Main Stage.
Nur-D understood that as well. When we asked about his vision he told us he was fine with a more static video rather than all the dynamic movement we caught during Taste. Of course, the Skull Dogs have never been ones to back down from a challenge.
If I’m being honest, I think the ideal placement for the camera tripod would have been in the middle of the pool. Jose was ready to break out the swimming trunks, but I’ve never tested our tripod in an aquatic setting like that, so I couldn’t say whether it would stay or just…float. I should have brought some sand bags to weigh it down, if for no other reason than a fun Behind The Scenes photo.
We settled for rigging up the tripod behind the pool, close enough to capture the whole performance from a clean, static angle and far enough that I was able to fit the full band in-frame and also avoid blocking the audience’s view too much.
Initially I had planned for Jose to man the tripod, he’d worked late the night before, so we both had anticipated him being tired. As it turned out, we came well rested and chipper, so I ended up letting him man the hand-camera this time while I worked the tripod.
As the audience started to fill into the space, it became increasingly clear just how narrow Jose’s available area of movement would be. At first we were mostly concerned about blocking people’s view or getting in the way, but by the time everyone had arrived our most pressing concern was simply if there would even be room for Jose to move at all.
Fortunately, if there were any issues with what Jose was able to capture with the hand cameral, I’d still have my static tripod shot to fall back on…
Until the crowd got up to dance
For the final stretch of the performance, my tripod angle was almost completely blocked. It was already at maximum height, and my 360 camera had already died at that point. There was nothing I could do except put my trust in Jose. The entirety of the final 3 performances would have to rely on them getting clean steady footage, with no margin for error because there wasn’t a shot to cut back to if things went wrong.
Of course, this is Jose we’re talking about. There’s no one I trust more, and they didn’t disappoint.
I did also have my phone out collecting some extra mobile footage - partially as backup footage, and partially because I thought it might be useful for making the Reel edits. When the crowd stood up and blocked my shot, I realized I could use my phone to solve that problem, as well. I had a extendable selfie stick that allowed me to raise my phone up and overhead of the crowd. Unfortunately, I’d be filming blind. I did capture a few good shots that I was able to use in the video, but after I re-adjusted to film horizontally rather than vertically, I ended up angling the phone down just a little too much and ended up with more footage of the crowd in the pool than of Nur-D’s performance.
That was a bit of a bummer, I think if I had managed to nail it that shot for more than a would have been really cool, but, the biggest technical scare actually came after the show, while I was reviewing the footage.
Before the performance, Jose had noticed that the Sony was estimating less recording time than what we needed, or what was normal. After checking the settings, they realized it was because I had set the camera to shoot at 60 frames per second. I’d set it that way because we’ve used 6.5K, 60 FPS before as a standard, but it takes up more space, and we’ve since been moving away from using it when we don’t actually need it, generally favoring 4K, 30 FPS unless a gig specifically needs higher specs.
He changed the setting and got the recording time back.
Unfortunately, something else changed too.
When I started editing, I realized the Sony had not recorded any audio.
I’m not sure how exactly it happened, and neither is Jose, but it turned out that somehow a variable framerate setting had been turned on - and that setting automatically disabled audio recording. I imagine the camera does this to prevent the audio and video from becoming misaligned. It’s actually a problem I’ve personally dealt with in the past, back in the early days of my Let’s Play YouTube channel.
The Thumbnail for my first Let’s Play Series back in 2015
One of the first games I played for the channel was the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot on PC. At the time, I used NVIDIA’S GeForce Experience to film my screen. Since those days, NVIDIA has fixed this issue (though now I just use the Windows+G capture menu instead), but the GeForce experience recorded at a variable bitrate. So I’d be editing my video, and after several minutes the audio would become misaligned seemingly out of nowhere. It was really frustrating to deal with because the footage was smooth and clean so it was nearly impossible to tell where the misalignment started, and then I’d have to manually fix it by cutting the audio and moving it back into position…only for it to become misaligned again a few minutes later. It was a bit of a nightmare, so I can see why filming with variable frame rate might cause the audio to be disabled but…It was just one of those moments where your stomach drops a little.
The DaVinci Resolve Timeline for the full video. Top Row ft. Jose’s footage with the Sony, bottom row is the Lumix footage
Thankfully, the Sony wasn’t our only audio source. I made certain of that - it was actually the main reason I used my phone for this gig, because I knew from experience that, while maybe not the highest quality, it could get fairly solid non-distorted audio even at such close range. Even so, we still had the Lumix audio, I made sure to use our TASCAM this time as well, which I think not being able to fit it into our set-up at Taste of MN was my biggest regret we made for that gig. It was too big and clunky to fit cleanly on either of our rigs when we were both doing hand-held cameras for that gig, but since I was able to use the tripod for The Hewing, that made it easy to hook up to the camera.
So, ultimately, the loss wasn’t devastating, but it did make syncing the Sony footage a bit more tricky that it otherwise would have been.
The show itself was a blast. It felt like an intimate summer rooftop concert among friends. The set was playful and leaned into a lot of the joyful and healing songs in Nur-D’s collection. Nur-D opened with “Sandy Cheeks” and moved through songs like “All My Friends Are So Hot,” “All of That,” “20 CHA,” “IDGAF,” “Damn You’re Hot,” “You Got Me,” “Windows Down,” “Famous,” “Still Alive,” “Break Chains,” and “Glorious.”
There were also a few bonus songs at the end: “Crush,” “Take My Picture,” and “Rival of the Moon.”
The crowd knew a lot of the songs, and even when the set list shifted around a little, the energy stayed loose and fun.
One of my favorite moments between songs was after Jose had crouched down for a shot and gotten a cramp. Nur-D noticed him and looked directly into the camera, addressing “the audience watching from home on the toilet.”
There were also some gorgeous visual moments. The rooftop gave us some incredible shots of Nur-D against the Minneapolis skyline.
After the show, we broke everything down and finally made our way to the green room. Jose needed to rest after the cramp and the physical strain of filming handheld in such a tight space, and I had a headache, probably from dehydration. So we took a little time to recover before heading out.
About a week later, we delivered the Hewing footage to Nur-D at his studio. Since he seems to be becoming a regular client, we bought a 2TB hard drive specifically for handing projects back and forth with him. That way, we won’t have to keep charging for flash drives every time we deliver files.
We also brought a few fun extras, including a poster connected to another project we’re working on with him…
While we were there, we talked through the logistics of upcoming work and ended up having a long conversation about Beyblade, now that Nur-D has enough Beyblades for a full tournament deck. So, we’ll see if “Professional Beyblader” gets added to his resume.
The delivery also happened to be on my reconnection anniversary with Jose, which made the day feel even more special. Afterward, Jose took me around to some of the places we visited when we first reconnected.
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