By Clive Young.
The 2010 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival was held back in April, but you can get a taste of the event from a new film, Coachelletta, a fantastic experimental short from filmmaker Sam O’Hare. Commissioned by festival organizers, the vignette captures the event using the ‘tilt shift’ style, which makes everything look like miniatures on an old Lionel train layout. In the process, not only does it take the massive fields of Indio, CA’s Empire Polo Club and bring them down to (a tiny) size, but it also captures the joyful spirit of a big music celebration.
Discussing the short’s with Aero Film, O’Hare named some of his favorite shots of the film and discussed how he captured the energy of the day:
I like the serendipity of occasionally finding people doing interesting things, like the girl doing the hula hoop and the guy dancing in the glowing stick figure outfit. You just see these little unplanned events and shoot them, and that’s the fun of the thing, it makes it quite like a documentary like in that respect. I also like the night shots in this – I did a lot of long exposures for these shots, up to two seconds, and so for some of those night shots you kind of get a blur and a shiver to the footage because the boom was actually moving in the wind. I rather like it as it adds to the energy of the night shots as the music track is starting to peak and the whole experience kind of leads up to that point.
It certainly works. While you watch it, keep an eye out for cool shots of the stage crew doing change-overs between sets, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of the Rat Sound-supplied FOH mix tent, teeny amongst the throngs of revelers.
