Hurry up and wait. That seemed to be the theme of the day until about 6:00pm. We all showed up to The Coach House at noon, blazing and raring to go. It was a frenzy of setting up everything from instruments, to lights, to a huge backdrop of a painting that Matt's dad did. Although we were filming at The Coach House, we brought all of our own audio recording equipment, lights, film crew, and we were going to radically change the stage. It was a lot of work. Espescially a lot of work to get done by our schedule film start time of 2:00pm. The band quickly set up their instruments while Alex Onana and his assistant Bjorn got all of the recording gear set up. We did a sound check and were ready to go. If only the cameras and lights were that easy to set up!
Lights, cameras....no action. The band went upstairs to get our hair and makeup done. I know, such rock stars. Over the next hour, Nate, Jesske, Sean, Tyler, Marriane, and I all took turns getting "visually prepared" by Lisa G and JP.
All this time gone by, and still, no action! We were getting hungry and ready to rock! Thankfully, there was super yummy Greek food that was catered, so we went down and ate. Mmmm, mmm good. About halfway through eating, we were told that it was time to start testing the cameras and to get ready.
We abandoned our food (thank God for the raw food bars I brought), hopped on stage and got to doing some camera tests. This went on for about 4 hours. I was officially
starting to get nervous. We were planning on playing one set with no audience, playing another set with an audience that was told to show up at 7:00pm, and Marriane Keith was to play a set in between. Yes, I was getting nervous. Finally, at around 6 o'clock, we just said, "roll it, we have to start now!". And that we did.
We proceeded to run through the first set over the next hour and a half or so. There were a couple of bumps in the beginning, and cameras had to be adjusted, but it was basically painless once we started playing. We redid a couple of songs to make sure we had good takes of everything, played a last few of the songs for people that started to filter in, let them know that we would be back for the real set later, and then we headed upstairs to the green room to relax for a bit while Marriane Keith played her set.
While Marriane was playing her set, the band and I headed up to the green room to prepare for our real set. We sat in the room talking, being silly, and the whole time, due to nerves, exhaustion, and eating mostly raw food power bars all day, I felt sick. For a while I really thought I was going to be sick, and I was starting to freak out. I had a beer to calm my stomach and we went into a different room and took lots of pictures with the highly amusing Katie Oswald. We got lots of great photos back there. Check a few of them out...
We talked, had fun, and took photos until Marriane was finished with her set and then, we took the stage again. We played through 13 songs in front of the small, invite only audience, of our close friends and family. I'm not going to lie, it was a tiring set to do after having spent the whole day setting up and also having played another twenty+ songs a couple hours earlier, but it was equally as thrilling to be playing for everyone and for the purpose of making this DVD, so we dug deep and pulled through with flying colors.
Huge thanks to everyone that was able to come out on a Sunday night, and to all of the awesome people that came out to be a part of the creation of this DVD. If you want to take a look at more photos, you can head over to Facebook or MySpace to see more. I am not sure when the final product will be out, but I will definitely let you know.
Stay tuned...
