The New Immigrant Experience

What it was

At the height of COVID I was working at a production company that mostly did live music: concerts and smaller festivals. They hired me because I knew livestream tech, and I got to work with some really special artists on bringing their work to people online.

Felipe Salles' award-winning The New Immigrant Experience is a musical documentary about the lives of immigrants today, set to one of the most amazing jazz compositions I've ever heard. When it's performed live, an orchestra plays the piece over documentary clips that get triggered at certain moments in the music.

The challenge

It was made for an audience in the room, and my job was to turn it into something worth watching over the internet. I was given total creative control over how to present it, which I hadn't really had at that job before.

What I did

Two things became clear to me. The documentary clips needed to fade smoothly into our cameras on the orchestra, so the whole thing felt more dreamlike. And if I duplicated (or triplicated) the camera feeds and shifted the opacity on several layers at once, I could make a kind of collage that cascaded between documentary footage, musicians, the conductor and whatever else we wanted.

Our team was also using the show to test the then brand-new Apple M1 chip, so I tried to push it to its limits. I layered four copies of our set of six cameras in the livestream software to get the effect. (I found out a fifth layer of overlapping 1080p feeds was the M1's limit.)

That would have been tricky to nail even if it was pre-recorded. We did it completely live, with one rehearsal, while I talked to three camera operators over walkie-talkie. I spent three weeks practicing for hours a day so the live show would go off without a hitch.

How it went

I'm really proud of it. There's a little jank and the occasional wrong camera, but for a completely live show with those constraints, I think I pulled off something really special.