Live From Bad Racket – Press Club of Cleveland Award

Our video series, Live From Bad Racket, recently got some local affection, winning it’s first  award on June 7th , 2011 –  with The Press Club of Cleveland. We’d like to formally congratulate our friend and resident film maker, Aaron Freeder, on winning this award for his incredible videography work.

The concept of a studio video feature actually started with our good friend Erin Fox, summer of 2010. She said that we could record a track and film the production, call it ‘live from bad racket’ and it would be cool. It was a pretty simple concept, and even though the series didn’t turn out to actually be ‘live’ we decided to keep with the moniker as the title when the project came together.

We connected with Aaron, who produced some great documentary work on the Grog Shop, and Ivan from Ohio Authority online magazine, earlier in 2010 at the first Weapons of Mass Creation Festival. Ohio Authority agreed to sponsor the series, while it was only an idea, as a publishing partner and to write a complimentary article about the artists from northeast ohio. We didn’t really know what we were going to make or how it was going to come together, but really, that’s minor details once you’ve got a good team put together.

We shot the pilot early October, 2010 with another close friend of ours, Max Stern, and his band Signals Midwest. The session was chaotic, really fun, but chaotic, I have no idea how it actually turned out well. The DAW and outboard gear were sort of mobile in the warehouse since we hadn’t built the control room yet, in fact, the whole studio was only about a quarter of the way finished. The band didn’t care, they crammed into our small isolation room with all of their gear, covered with blankets and power-slabs, and ripped out amazing performances of their unreleased track “In Tensions”. Aaron danced his lens as best he could in the limited space to capture everything going on.

Production

After the production was finished and edited, Ohio Authority interviewed Signals Midwest and published the video along side a feature article In November of 2010. The story and the video qualified for a Cleveland Press Club Award in the category “New Media, Imaging. To our astonishment, Live From Bad Racket: Signals Midwest won the category, competing against very notable press outlets in Northeast Ohio.

We hope we’re able to continue making these video features for everyone to enjoy, and look forward to meeting and working with more of the incredibly talented musicians who are sprouting out of Ohio these days.