ROXETTE 2012 – FANtastic!

ROXETTE 2012 – FANtastic!

A mini-documentary about Roxette’s 2012 world tour.

The story of Roxette’s world tour and the special relationship between the band and the fans.
Recorded on the 29th of June 2012 in the Heineken Music Hall, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Produced exclusively for the Daily Roxette.
Shot, edited & directed by Colin van der Bel

I’ve been a huge fan of Roxette since I was about 10 years old. I started collecting their records and those of all the related bands (Gyllene Tider, solo albums, etc.) and of course visited many concerts. Some years ago I joined the team of Roxette’s biggest independent news website, the Daily Roxette. Having seen the fall of the Roxette fanclub, the Daily Roxette remained the one website fans could also fall back to. The first time I really started photographing seriously was during Per Gessle’s Party Crasher Tour in Gent, Belgium. Soon after that I purchased a dslr camera and started taking pictures at more shows. Since I’ve ventured into filmmaking in the past couple of years, I came up with the idea of doing a mini-documentary about Roxette when I heard they were going to play in Amsterdam. I had done a short interview with Per before at the Bospop festival and shot some footage from the crowd, but this time I wanted to do better.

First I had to get permission to film a part of the show from the table in the middle of the room and do a few interviews. When the day was finally there I started by filming and interviewing fans that were waiting in front of the venue. I chose the venue itself as the background for this.

When the interviews outside were done, the tour manager took me inside where they had reserved a room especially for the interviews, which was an awesome thing of them to do. I had some time to set up my super low budget light kit (this project obviously had no budget so the only things I could use were the things I had lying around my office) and cameras.

I interviewed Per Gessle, Christoffer Lundquist and Dea Norberg and got some really great material! I filmed the interviews with my Canon 7D and the 24-70 2.8L lens as the main camera. I also placed a second camera at a different angle to have some backup shots which I ended up using because I liked them creatively. That backup camera was a camcorder (Panasonic SD-600). The last interview I did with Per I used my Zoom H4n but without an attached mic and honestly the sound was awful. So this time I brought a lavalier mic which has great sound (of course I recorded the stereo signal just in case).

We recorded the interviews while the support act was performing so when we were done I had to pack up my gear and rush downstairs to the room to be able to catch the beginning of the show. The area where I could set up my cameras was in the middle of the room, so you can imagine having to get through the crowd with two tripods and two camera bags wasn’t that easy. I was just in time, because as soon as I hit record on the audio recorder the show started. I was allowed to record and use parts of the first three songs. After those three I enjoyed the rest of the concert, but during the last song I moved to the front of the room to record some images of the fans in the front row.

Since the launch of Final Cut Pro X last year I’ve been a supporter of this great piece of software so this was a great chance to edit a project like this and test it. Luckily, while I was working on this project, updates were releases at exactly the right moments. Like I said, most of the work was done in FCPX. My friend Thomas mixed the live audio in Soundbooth, I mixed the interviews myself in FCPX. The creative b-roll parts other than single photos were made by Jessica in After Effects and she also designed the titles in Motion. I got all those great fan photographs by requesting them before the show on the Daily Roxette’s website. After the edit was locked, Jessica made the subtitles and put those over the edit after the color correction and color grading was finished (which by the way was also done in FCPX itself).

Everything was shot in 16:9 aspect ratio but keeping in mind I wanted to end up with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio in the end so I taped the camera screens while recording. FCPX doesn’t support this aspect ratio but I used Alex4D’s awesome Widescreen Matte effect to edit the material and had Compressor crop the image for the final output.