The Concert Film That Almost Didn't Happen

In September 2024, Darren Morrison asked me to film Cirque de Musique, his first fancy show with the band, at the San Angelo Performing Arts Center. I roamed the auditorium all night with my camera, slipped backstage between songs, and went home with 66 clips and mixed feelings about what we'd shot.

Plan A: the full concert

The plan was a full-concert video: every song, start to finish. In my mind, I would play the master audio tracks for the songs and cut in my backstage clips with on-camera audio along the way. That only works if the sound is great, because nobody wants to watch a concert that sounds like it was recorded from the parking lot.

I looked through the footage and started to put something of a video together. Then I opened a text from Darren: "... there is an electric static on some of the audio tracks, I'm not sure we can fix it." Many theories exist as to why the master tracks from that night were not usable, but I resigned myself to the fact that we were going to be limited to the audio captured on my camera. Audio can only be cleaned up so much, especially when there is static interference embedded in the track.

Without a clean board mix there was no full-concert video, so the footage went on a hard drive and sat there for two years. I occasionally revisited the project in DaVinci Resolve, but the inspiration to finish it never materialized.

Plan B: make it about Darren

What saved the project was realizing the best stuff wasn't on stage at all. Darren is a true artist, very much "out there," and one of the funniest people I know. I had Darren wear a Rode Wireless Go lav mic (tethered to my camera) all night, so I had hours of his offhand comments: backstage, between songs, wandering through the crowd.

So the new idea was a music-video-meets-documentary. We keep the funny moments and the backstage stuff, and use the music to carry you between them, instead of trying to show every song. This opened the door to inspiration that could carry the video to completion.

A charming sub-plot also emerged when I changed the approach: Darren and Cheyenne's exchanges. Cheyenne is the kid of Billy Dan, the band's guitar player, and was backstage with us all night. Throughout the backstage interactions, Darren and Cheyenne trade warmly suspicious jabs at one another. Like when Darren snaps a photo of the wifi password and Cheyenne sets the record straight: "I'm not 7, I'm 9." Or when Darren has to cut off Cheyenne's pay at the end of the night because "that's what we agreed to." Although I had reviewed this footage many times, approaching the video in this new way made me see those charming threads, and they gave the video a story I had not seen until then.

The fixes

A few problems had to be solved before any of that could work:

• A buzz on every clip. All 66 audio files had a constant low buzz in the right channel. I cleaned up every one of them before cutting a single scene.
• The speaker is usually off-screen. I was roaming the building, so when Darren says something great, the camera is often pointed somewhere else. On-screen captions solved that, and they let me keep Darren's whispered backstage lines too. (Which are just golden.)
• A heavy Texas accent. Automatic transcripts needed a little help figuring out what Darren was saying, so some captions had to be checked by ear.
• Smooth, not choppy. Every piece of B-roll fades in and out, so the film feels like one continuous night instead of a pile of clips.

I had AI help along the way, mostly with the tedious parts: sorting clips, drafting captions, and the buzz cleanup. Every edit decision was still mine. (The full AI side of that story is going in its own AI Notebook post.) But I never would have seen the "story" in this new light without Claude, connected to DaVinci Resolve through MCP, processing all of that footage alongside me.

My favorite part

If you only watch one song, make it "Pelorus Jack." I love that song, and I love how we shot it. The song itself is hilarious and TRUE. (Seriously, look it up.)

I love one-takes, in general, in just about any setting. It was the one song that Darren played on the grand piano. The house light on Darren was stunning, and you get a gentle backdrop of crowd reaction, all in one take.

It was also the only song in which I was in full view of the audience while filming. I tried to stay very still so I wouldn't distract anyone. After the show, I asked my wife (who was in the audience) if she could see me during that song, and she said she could not. I stared through my camera's viewfinder for nearly the entire song, so my vision was a lopsided, blurry mess for a solid 20 minutes afterward.

Why I'm glad I didn't give up on it

The band loved it, and Darren gave me permission to post it on my YouTube channel. For two years this was the project I couldn't finish. It turns out the footage was fine all along. I just had to stop trying to make it the video I had planned and see the one that was already there.

You can watch the full film above or on YouTube. If you like it, Darren's music, tour dates and more are at darrenmorrison.com. And if you want the earlier chapter of our collaboration, check out the Mi Corazón music video we made in Christoval in 2022.