Forum Concert Bowl, Montreal QC

This film is quite nice and captured two shows on the rarely filmed And Then There Were Three tour with mirrors. The quality is great for 8mm, but this film is really on it's last leg. It is falling apart and has many scratches and spots. The damage is even more pronounced in HD, as are of course the other details. To see how much of a difference HD makes, the film came loose for about 10 seconds at the end of Cinema Show/beginning of Afterglow and was lost to the HD transfer, so I had to use an older SD transfer. To my eyes, HD shows a beautifully detailed (however grainy) image compared to SD.

The HD camera captured a nice widescreen view (1.55) which is about 15% wider than regular SD. The clips are reasonably long, as 8mm goes. No decent audio exists from these nights, so I used various soundboard recordings. Always disappointing to see a note or drum hit on the film exactly where I know it should be, only to find it was not played "correctly" on the audio I was using. So I chose the soundboard audio that matched best. I used a dynamic exposure in order to see the great light show as well as some of the darker moments with the lasers. This tour shows Genesis at their musical best IMO, so it is great that we have such a document.


Peter Gabriel - Rochester, New York 6 March 1977 (10:23) - Includes clips of On the Air, Moribund the Burgermeister, Waiting For the Big One, Excuse Me, Ain't That Peculiar, Slowburn, All Day and All of the Night, Here Comes the Flood, Modern Love, Down the Dolce Vita, Back in NYC

This film is my favorite of any film I've worked on, because it has some of the best video recording of the first leg of Gabriel's first solo tour, and was in fact his second solo show ever. It was supposed to be his first show, but at the last minute they added a warm-up show the night before in NJ. We are treated to some very early renditions of songs, some technical f-ups, and Tony Levin with hair! This film was transferred in full HD, but no widescreen was captured on the filmstock.

I did something with this film that I've never done before and will probably never do again. I normally do several transfers, and change between them as the lighting for the concert changes. The reason is that a light transfer can expose many background images, the drummer for instance while making the foreground too bright, or a dark transfer can reduce noise and maintain good exposure on the foreground but often the stage just looks too dark to my eyes. In this case I was not entirely happy with either situation, so for this film I actually matched up every single frame of film from a light transfer and dark transfer and blended the two. The results are beautiful, nicely exposed foreground while still seeing the background, but the effort required was a little on the crazy side.

The concert was filmed by my friend Duane Sherwood who used "indoor" filmstock of 160 ISO (don't laugh, this was the 70s). Duane got some great closeups and almost always stayed in focus. He was studying to be photographer at the time. For the audio I used a recording that his friend made with a large reel recorder at the same show. The audio quality is quite good, much clearer than other recordings, but the taper started and stopped the recording a lot to "save tape" and captured no in-between song stories. I was able to use this great audio for about 90% of the film, and the more complete recording for the rest.

I added still photographs (most I licensed from Cleveland photographer Janet Macoska) from the same tour in order to create more continuity between the clips. Some interesting moments for me include Peter's look when he realizes he repeated the same line from Here Comes The Flood...or the band jamming at end of Down the Dolce Vita..or in Back in NYC when he screams into the mic, quite a large amount of a spirited Back in NYC was captured...it doesn't get much better than this, for me anyway


Peter Gabriel - Montreal, Canada 4 July 1980 (4:08) - Includes clips of I Don't Remember, Family Snapshot, Milgram's 37, Modern Love, Not One of Us, Lead a Normal Life, Moribund the Burgermeister, Mother of Violence, Humdrum

I know I say that every film is so difficult to work with, but it is kinda true. Every film has it's challenges, or I am too picky, or both. In this case, Peter's 1980 show was almost completely made up of 2 colors, black and yellow. This created a contrast problem where some subtleties that were not yellow were lost. I tried my best to salvage these non yellow areas, and did a mix of 4 different transfers to get the closest to what I was looking for.

There are nice close-ups as well as full stage views. It seems as if the filmer intended to capture more of this show, because it comes at the end of one reel, and then begins the next reel. But unfortunately, this second reel only lasts a few moments before breaking. There is no audio from this show, so I used various soundboard sources, mostly from Cardiff to best match the video. In some cases, the Cardiff show was too different from the film so I used a different show. The widescreen captured in this case was 1.59 (almost 20% wider than standard SD). We are treated to an interesting (albeit short) glimpse into PG's 1980 tour.