Production Log: Community Parade Floats Edinburgh Festival Cavalcade Production

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Since 1947, the Edinburgh Festival Cavalcade has taken place in Edinburgh to signal the start of the Fringe Festival. The cavalcade is a parade made up from the performers of the Fringe in addition to local community groups and marching bands which includes the cast of the world renowned Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. The event takes place at the beginning of August annually and atracts many thousands of visitors visiting Scotland and local families and groups of friends. Despite occuring every year since it's inception, for the first time in it's history, the cavalcade did not take place in 2011 due to a lack of funding to support the event. Hopefully, the event will return in the future. Rumours have been around stating that the cavalcade may now become a two year event which would be possible with current funding available for staging the event.

I have always been a spectator to the event and so I wanted to try and gain an opportunity to film the event on the ground. To achieve this, I approached cavalcade Director, David Todd firstly in 2008 to seek permission to shoot the event. He gladly accepted and I took along my Hi8 camera to record the event. It wasn't until the following summer that David got in contact with me again to record the event a second time of the parade to take place during August, 2009.

My aim was to create a better video of the event than the one I produced in 2008 so I decided that using multi cameras might cover the event in more detail. I've been a member of the Edinburgh Cine & Video Society since 2006 so I posted an ad at the club to see if anyone would like to help collaborate with me on the project as a Camera Operator. The response was good initially where I managed to get together a team of five to record the event.

To gain the best coverage, I put together a very rough diagram of where I wanted to position cameras. One of the members of the team, Peter Dick wanted to try out his new HDV camera at a height so he ended up filming the parade from the Crags in Holyrood Park which produced some excellent results. I particularly enjoyed the shots of the Scottish Parliament in the background and the marching bands seen from afar.

Two of the Camera Operators were positioned on the ground within the parade route which included me. When I arrived a couple of hours before the event, me and Bob Bell, another ECVS member picked up some orange high visibility vests to alert people that we were filming. I quite liked having this as it made me feel more professional. Getting close to performers during filming was a good idea where between us we managed to gain some interesting, comical shots of the performers. Bob Bell managed to capture some shots of the crowds waving and smiling which added a community feel to the video. I especially liked his sneaky shot of a woman singing Batman where she obvisouly seems oblivious to the fact that she's being filmed, only to realize that she is at the last moment.

I enjoyed one of my shots where I weaved in between the Massed Pipes and Drums which I think adds excitement to the video. Another memorable moment for me was filming the Swiss Army band which were kind enough to march in a circle around a roundabout in order for a badly placed crowd to see some action. They loved the band for giving them a photo opportunity. Being able to follow the bands behind them worked well too for giving the audience an unsual look at the performers in my opinion. Bob managed to get a shot of the pipers by using a monopod lifted high in the air which created an interesting look. I found that when filming the bands, you have to be on your feet, watching out for where they are marching to and you have to make sure you don't get hit by a drum major's mace. Another of my shots which worked well was a pan shot on the ground of Royal Air Force Pipes and Drums which added another different perspective to the video. I also found that Chinese Dragons are easy to get tangled up in when filming!

There were two other Camera Operators who filmed the event really for fun which were Ann Sutherland and Jim Close, also members of the Edinburgh Cine and Video Society. Their cameras could only film footage in the 4:3 format so I never used any of the footage from their cameras. Their footage wasn't useable anyway in comparison with the footage from the other three cameras as their positions were within the crowds and the shots weren't very glamarous.

The Post Production stage was a challenging one. The three cameras were quite different from each other, one shooting HDV and the other two SD where Bob's Canon's video quality was superior to my P2 HVX200 I managed to borrow with permission from my college lecturer from Jewel & Esk College, Gerard Lohan. When placing some of the clips on the timeline, Peter's HDV footage played back at slow motion and featured a flickering motion. After a few days of frustration, I managed to set the correct frame field options for rendering within Sony Vegas and produce a good mpeg 2 video master mixing SD with HDV. At the time of producing the video, I was using the Platinum version of Sony Vegas which doesn't support 16:9 export! Sadly, this video should have been exported as 16:9 so I've been left with a letterboxed 16:9 video unfortunately with no option to create a proper 16:9 version. It happens. Having multiple coverage made it easier to cut the marching band segments to music as I could use a high angle shot followed by footage from the ground. I used some crossfading techniques to create the illusion that the shots occurred during the same march when in reality, the footage was taken from various different parts.

The music overlaid over the community floats section of the video was composed by Kevin MacLeod from incomptech.com, well known for providing royalty free music online licensed under the creative commons license. In addition to the video quality difference between the cameras me and Bob had, the sound quality was different too where it was much more muffled on my HVX200 and the video was softer. To compensate, I had to carry out some colour correction and adjust the sound levels although for my footage, the sound recorded just wasn't high enough in comparison with Bob's onboard microphone.

Looking back the day, it was interesting to film some of the Harley Davidson motorcycles prior to the start of the parade. Maybe in the future, I could think about recording some vox pops with some of the participants and carry out an interview with the cavalcade director to add some insight into the event. I chose not to include commentary in the video so that the viewer could enjoy the music more without interruption. I'm not sure if it needs a bit commentary in some places, I think I was right to choose not to for the marching bands. The captions seemed to work well with telling the audience about the group without spoiling the music.

Some interesting facts about the day; Bob Bell had an interesting discussion with a retired police officer he used to work with and he also spoke with a woman from the states which made for some interesting conversation. I was also offered some cheese from a member of the crowd which was delicious. There were a few other crews about on the day where I spoke to some of the photographers although even today, I'm unsure of who they were working for.

Let me know your own thoughts and opinions after viewing the video and post your comments here. If you have any suggestions for future projects too then don't be afraid to tell me them.

Article written by Alan Andrew Taylor, © 2011 Willow Creek Pictures

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