Video Production Helps Bring a Locally-Grown Festival in Oregon to a Wider Audience
Over a 16-year span, the annual Pickathon Music Festival —so-named, according to executive producer Zale Schoenborn, for the “hand-picked” assortment of artists across a wide range of genres — has grown from a modest shindig at Horning’s Hideout in Portland, OR to a three-day music festival with seven unique stages on Pendarvis Farm, an 88-acre horse farm framed by the forests and mountains near Happy Valley, OR, a half-hour outside of the big city.
The atmosphere at Pickathon is as different from, say, the Electric Daisy Music Festival in Las Vegas as a Walmart Supercenter is from a local farmer’s market. Instead of tens of thousands of security-cleared attendees throbbing in synch to the amplified beat of a world-renowned DJ amid blasts of strobes and pyro (and leaving a lot of litter in their wake), Pickathon’s campers eat locally-grown foods served on multi-use plates, canteens and utensils, composting edible leftovers.
Schoenborn and his team, most of whom still have “day jobs,” spend 11 months planning, organizing and picking the musical acts for the lineup at the unique event. “We are constantly on the lookout for up-and-coming bands and musical acts that bring excitement and energy to their performance,” he notes.
During the festival, band members, many who camp out during the event as well, start as early as noon and continue well into the night, playing as late as 3 a.m.
For the past nine years, the Pendarvis family has opted to host the music festival as an alternative to selling their land to housing developers as Portland’s suburbs encroach on the area. The majestic natural setting lets the “weekend festival for those who love music” also serve as “a getaway” and “family event” for many, Schoenborn notes; “a mini-vacation with camping, Portland based restaurants, food trucks, and activities for children,” with an atmosphere that emphasizes not just music but community, environmental awareness and sustainable living.
Nature and Technology
If natural beauty is a big part of the Pickathon weekend experience, the event is infused with human artistry and technical wizardry as well. Along with CAD-designed sail-and-truss structures, there is an underlying technical sophistication that extends from the lighting and sound used for the live performances the video production capturing the on-site magic for broadcasts and web streaming to the world.
The main Mountain View stage emerges each year on a field on the side of the hill that gets used for horse grazing 11 months of the year. “It feels like the ground of the Mt. View Stage was formed specifically for us,” says video producer Ryan Stiles. “It creates a natural audience seating area. The picturesque mountains of Oregon naturally frame up behind the stage, thus the name.”
GuildWorks, the company providing the white and multi-colored fabric and asymmetric truss structures, “spent a few weeks before the rest of the production team carefully planning and laying out the multi layered wind sail,” says Stiles. “It took months before that planning, designing and laying out the sail design in CAD with careful measurements taken from the site,” he adds.
“With the Mt. View Stage, we didn’t want to see the typical straight up and horizontal truss system you see at almost every music festival out there,” says Schoenborn. “We wanted to keep the symmetry, but different angles with the truss and position of the lights that you don’t normally see.”
The goal of all the designs of the various performance spaces was to make each unique and feel separate from each other. “The Woods Stage is just that, a stage out in the woods, designed and constructed with raw materials found on the farm,” says Stiles. “At first glance, you may think that the stage was formed by nature.”
“The Galaxy Barn is our indoor performance space,” adds Schoenborn. “It is very intimate space with low ceilings and kind of feels like a hole-in-the-wall nightclub. It can only fit 300 or so people at one time.”
Students from the University of Portland came up with the sustainable and reusable design of the Treeline Stage, a new addition for the 2014 event. It makes use of standard shipping pallets, positioned at various angles, to form a solid structure on the side of a hill. At the end of the festival, the pallets could be reused.
“The overall goal of all the performance space was high design — minimal impact on the atmosphere of the grounds while still providing heightened production value,” says Stiles.
Light in the Woods
If the performance areas each feature a unique design, LD Dan Meeker was presented with unique challenges in ensuring that each would be well lit.
“Some of the stages are a quarter mile from each other, with no power lines of any kind,” he notes. “The power for the various stages came from generators which had to be hidden and/or concealed and sound-dampened, either by distance from the stage or by stack of hay bales.”
The overall concept of design for the various spaces “let the spaces speak for themselves, with lighting providing accents and highlights,” Meeker adds. “We didn’t want the typical truss rig filled with endless amounts of light.” Instead, there is “just enough to provide illumination, some aerials and effects. It is about the music, not flash and trash.”
Along with those in attendance — total ticket sales were capped below the 4,000 mark — Meeker was mindful of the thousands who would be viewing the performances via webcasts. “There had to be enough light for the broadcast as well as an inspiring picture that worked both on camera and in the house.”
Elaborate Webcast Support
For music lovers who were not able to travel to Happy Valley or snap up the tickets, Pickathon provided a weekend-long live stream of individual festival performances. “We do this in order to bring the music to an even wider audience,” says Schoenborn. “What is truly amazing is the following that we have each year, including the East Coast of the U.S. and the U.K.” More than 10,000 log on to watch a total of 44 hours of live music that gets streamed live during the event.
To accomplish that a feat, rotating crews comprised of 68 staff members with an additional 223 volunteers operated the cameras and switchers and edited the footage from each stage, with Stiles overseeing the whole content-capturing and delivery operation.
A centralized master control was set up behind the main stage. It included a Blackmagic Design ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K and an ATEM 1 M/E Broadcast Panel. All of the feeds from the various stages were routed via production switchers and fiber optics strung through the trees back to the Master Control area.
“At any one time, depending on who was performing on any giving stage, we could take that feed live to the live stream,” Stiles says. “Having the overlapping bands playing made it so that there was never a shortage of music on the stream. “We relied heavily on volunteers,” Stiles adds, noting that, “in exchange, we give them plenty of time off during the weekend to catch some of the performances.”
In recent years, the broadcast team with Pickathon has been steadily increasing their standards and quality of video work. “It is kind of like a DIY project,” says Stiles, when referring to the broadcast setup. “We have been increasing cameras and production equipment each year. Recently we began to invest heavily in Blackmagic Design products. Not just because they are affordable, but because they offer HD and even 4K products designed to work together and make our workflow simpler.”
Pickathon 2014
Crew
- Executive Producers: Zale Schoenborn, Eric Schoenborn, Terry Groves, Ned Failing, Michael Dorr
- Producer: Ryan Stiles
- Festival Production Manager: Will Savery
- Lighting Designer: Daniel Meeker
- Operation Site Manager: Ronnie Boicourt
- Architects of the Air/Lead Designers: Mar Ricketts, Sebastian Collet
- Awning Company: GuildWorks
- Lighting Companies: Indigo Design, Christie Lites
- Production Manager: Seth Chandler
- Production Coordinator: Alisha Flaumenbaum
- Broadcast Engineer: Devin Knutson
- Streaming Master Control: Nick Montrond
- Post Production Manager: John Petrina
- Stage Production Manager: Jack Miller, Melissa Walther, William Thoma, Aaron Filipowsky, Ellery Sally, Andrew Verhoeven
- Directors: David Slay, Peter Schmidt, Tim Rooney, Kellen Harrel, Mia Sires, Spencer Raymond, Michael DiNapoli
Lighting Gear, by Stage
Mountain View & Fir Meadow Stages
2 High End Systems Hog 4
22 Martin MAC Viper Profiles
4 Vari*Lite VL2500 Spots
16 Chauvet COLORado 1-Tri-Tours
6 Chroma-Q ColorForce 72s
10 Chroma-Q ColorForce 48s
9 Chroma-Q ColorForce 12s
12 ETC Source Four Ellipsoidals
2 Base Hazer Pros
2 ProPower RPD/36 x 20amps
2 24 x 2.4K dimmer racks
Woods Stage
1 High End System Full Boar 4
3 Vari*Lite VL2500 Spots
2 Martin MAC Auras
18 Chroma-Q ColorForce 12s
6 Par 38s
2 Pin Spots
1 ETC Source Four Ellipsoidal
1 4 x 600W Dimmer
Starlight Stage
3 ETC Source Four Ellipsoidals
4 ETC Source Four Pars
12 Pixel Range PixelPAR 44s
12 Chauvet COLORado 1-Tri Tours
2 4 x 600w dimmers
Galaxy Barn
1 High End Systems Full Boar 4
4 Martin MAC Auras
2 Vari-Lite VL2500 Spots
4 Chroma-Q ColorForce 12
1 Chroma-Q ColorForce 48
2 Chroma-Q ColorForce 72
2 ETC Source Four Ellipsoidals
2 ETC Source Four Pars
1 Look Solutions Unique 2 Hazer
Workshop Barn
4 ETC Source Four Pars
1 4 x 600w dimmer
1 Pocket DMX Controller
Beer Garden
12 Chauvet COLORado 1-Tri Tours
Video Gear
Cameras:
1 Blackmagic Production Camera (4K)
5 Blackmagic Studio Cameras (HD)
40 Canon cameras (14 205 HD, 12 XA25, 2 XF100, 12 5D Mark III)
5 Panasonic GH4 Cameras
1 Sony NEW-FS700
5 GoPro Hero 3
Other: (Blackmagic Design; partial list)
3 ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K
4 ATEM 1 M/E Production Switchers
1 ATEM 1 M/E Broadcast Panel
3 ATEM Television Studio
3 H.264 Pro Recorders
6 ATEM Camera Converters
3 ATEM Studio Converters
2 HyperDeck Studio Pros
2 HyperDeck Shuttles
10 Mini Converters (HD/SDI to HDMI)
3,800’ Fiber Optic Cable
