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Behind the scenes at a live concert production
 In December of 2009, just a few days before we left for a six month stay in Canada, we had the privilege of partnering with a French music group called Les Passagers (the passengers) to produce a concert that will be broadcast by CNA.
We have a special feeling of comaderie with Les Passagers, as we have worked together with various members of the band in several different ministry settings; Lorenzo Monge, the band leader, participated in many of our interchurch worship sessions; Christophe Prunneaux, keyboard/violin/multiinstrumentalist, came with us to Montreal in 2006, partcipated in an MBMSI conference leading worship in Portugal, and has helped in several other projects; and of course Martin Bartlett, who has been on several tours with us, played in all kinds of situations and helped in so many ways. In fact Marjorie and I were the ones who introduced Martin to Les Passagers and suggested that they might be a good fit. That was about five years ago, and they have been together ever since.
Russ produced the first album that Les Passagers did, and it was a great time of working together. We have found kindred spirits in Les Passagers as they too are using their music and artistic expression to reach out to their fellow man and express the wonder of what God has done in their lives.
So we were quite excited when we first started talking about the possibility of doing a live recording of a Passagers concert to be used to
 broadcast for CNA. It took us a while to find a date that would work with everyone, as well as a suitable venue, which ended up being an artistic center in the middle of Paris called the Pavé d'Orsay. This room was used for artistic expressions of all kinds, including paintings, photography, poetry readings, dramatic presentations, and of course, concerts.
We visited the venue a couple of weeks before the concert date and discussed how to set up cameras, lighting and the scene with Steve Thrall who was in charge of the center. It's not a very big room, and the audience would be limited to about 50 or so people, all specially invited by Les Passagers and coming with the express purpose of being involved with the production.
Fortunately, the people who started the Pavé d'Orsay had installed a lighting grid (basically steel pipes attached to the ceiling in a grid) and had installed quite a few lights and a dimmer so we were able to use their existing system. The colours they were using were not quite what we were thinking we wanted for a concert setting so we needed to purchase a number of gels and other materials.
The day before the concert we spent about ten hours moving and aiming lights, preparing equipment and getting things ready.
 The day of the concert, the group had a last dress rehearsal at their normal practise location while we installed the computer and interfaces and prepared the room. We had to wait a bit before starting because there was a Chinese church using the room just before us which we hadn't known about so there was some slightly tense waiting time before we could start.
Setting up the band, positioning cameras, verifying microphones, and configuring interfaces and software took another two hours or so, and then we were able to start. People had already started arriving, and we carefully positioned them around tables and standing in corners to make the ambiance look like a French café with people having fun. Everyone had to remember their positions and were given instructions on how to act (basically smile, have fun, clap lots and be enthusiastic).
The group did two concerts in a row, with a break in the middle for a quick meal. There were a couple of sound problems at one point in the first concert but the second concert went very well, and we ended up using mostly songs from this second set.
Les Passagers perform regularly all over France and have developed their own style which is kind of an eclectic mix of rock, pop, celtic, folk, and jazz. They have worked hard on their concert presentation and it showed as they launched into each song.
It was only in July that we were able to start opening all the files and transerring the video to see what we had actually captured. Our discovery
 wasn't all good; the audio interfaces had started misbehaving at some point and had added a lot of clicks and pops to the tracks recording, and some of the cameras were set with a bit too much gain.
We've now basically finished the audio mixes. Removing the clicks took Russ about a week of very monotonous editing work, but after that the mixes were fairly straightforward. Marjorie is still editing the video as our idea is to be able to show each song individually as a music video, and also put them together into a special concert television program.
One of the things we're still wanting to do is get some personal interviews with some of the band members and add that to the concert footage to make it even more effective as an outreach tool.
CLICK HERE to see the first song in it's music video style. The name of the song is Terre Minée (landmined earth). The song title is a play on words in French because it sounds like "terminé" which is "terminated" in english. The song is about stopping our indifference and starting to make a difference in the world.
Russ
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