Hi! My name is Colin Crowley and I am a multimedia field producer
for PBS Wisconsin. For Mile of Music, I am sort of the
coordinating producer of a series of field crews and our
goal is to spend the weekend going around filming as many
performances as we can get. Get as much footage of the festival
and talk to as many people as we can. So, Mile of Music is
probably one of the biggest projects we've ever done and
we've been planning this for almost a year. So, working with
the Mile of Music Team, working with the Appleton community,
and also working with almost everybody at PBS Wisconsin to
come up with a plan to film what is really a unique
festival, in that there's 200 artists. There's 40 venues and
we gotta try to give our audience a flavor of
everything, realizing that we can't do everything at once.
So we're trying to get like just the right performances.
Talking to the right people to really give our viewers an idea
of what it's like to be at this festival, what the energy is,
how the community comes together, all the different
types of music you can hear, you can hear rock music, you
can hear Americana, you can hear folk music, you can hear
singer-songwriters, and we're trying to give everybody a
taste of all of that. So, I would say I'm a hobbyist
musician myself. I've played in bands before and I think
there's a lot of crossover between, let's say, film making and
making music because in film making and making television
you're focused on rhythm, you're focused on mood, and so when we
come in and film artists, we're really trying to get - we're
trying to bring people inside the music. So, actually a lot of
the people on these crews are musicians themselves, so we're
getting a feel for when is this chorus going to hit, when is
this vocalist going to do something, and we're trying to
contribute to that with the way we film it with the movements
we incorporate it, incorporate to it, and then also when we do
the edit, there's a lot of musicality and rhythm to the
way we edit our pieces. So, this is a beautiful
collaboration for us to work with all these talented artists
and for us to bring our kind of musical sense to the way we
film their performances. Some of the equipment I personally
use is, one is I have a spreadsheet that I'm constantly
tweaking. That's our schedule. Constantly adapting to things
trying to get a variety of venue, a variety of
venues, a variety of different types of performers. I also run
a camera and film a camera but really when we think about
technology, for me, that's just a tool and any tool is only as
good as the person who's using it. So, for me, the most
important resource we have at PBS Wisconsin is our people and
one of the things I love about PBS Wisconsin, and that's all
coming together in this project, is we work with the best people.
Everybody we work with, not only are they talented at what they
do, skilled at what they do, technically skilled, they're
all just amazing human beings. We come from all over the
country. Some of us come from different countries altogether
and we've all come together in Wisconsin at PBS Wisconsin
because we love what we do. We love this state. We love the
people of this state and we love coming to communities like
Appleton and showing how everything comes together and
creates the culture that we all know and love here in Wisconsin.