Is that cool or what :-) Looking back at the Southam Hall ...
The Hip came on pretty much on time and I started filming ... the images that appear on this blog are from songs that I did not recognize or care for ... but I recorded 2 hours and 9 minutes of music, which I have mastered into a movie and which is being rendered to a PS sized image as I write this. I tried rendering it in full 640x480 with high quality 2-pass video, but Nero Vision reported that it would take 37 hours ... so I chose the PSP format, which is still quite good and takes 50 minutes :-).
There are 40 images total, but I only show some of them here. To see the whole set, go to my gallery in this album.
The set list was pretty great ... Nick says we did well. We got a song that he's been waiting for for 5 shows ... now I forget which one :-)
Anyway .... back to Gord Downey. He is the most compelling stage artist I have ever seen, and I've seen Mick Jagger live. Gord is simply incredible ... watch my movie when it gets posted (YouTube cannot suck in that big a movie, and I refuse to post 25 separate files there, so I have to come up with some other technique. I'll post it here when I figure it out.)
The lighting was typically Hip ... lots of bright spots and excellent overall ambiance on stage.
It is rarely dark on stage, but once in a while you get a black background. The Canon G10 was my only option because the Fuji F70EXR is still missing in action. The Fuji would have handled the images better (by a nose) ... but the Canon handled the video brilliantly. I have decided that I must keep both ...
Gord always carries a hanky ... he sweats like a pig.
Gord's dancing is something to behold. He combines it with movements with the mic stand or with the hanky so that it becomes a form of art on its own. He shows you facial expressions that convey surprise when he fails to catch the mic after kicking it up with his feet for example. It's very entertaining ...
He almost always breaks a mic stand and tosses parts into the audience after twirling it like a baton. I have that stuff in the film. This film is 2:09:46 long and contains some amazing footage of Gord Downey interacting with the audience. It gets a little jumpy after an hour or so, as you can imagine the pain it gave me to hold the camera over my head for that long ... anyway, you can download it here. This is a 600MB file, though, so be aware of how long it will take!
Anyway .... enough said. If you have never seen the Hip live, you owe it to yourself to do so. I mean it ....
