Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
Yes it was that expensive. If you want a proper film or video, you'd have to have several cameras. If you're doing it right, you have one camera on each band member. And if you really want to, you might have one or two cameras on the audience, too. Professional grade videotape or film is expensive.
Then you've gotta have cameramen (or women) to operate the cameras. Trust me, this is more important than you can imagine. It's the difference between something that looks brilliant (watch the Grateful Dead Movie to see something that looks brilliant) and something that looks like it was shot by your father, on Christmas morning, before he even knew how to properly use the home movie camera (the David Bowie Ziggy Stardust film comes to mind in this regard...terrible cinematography in that one). So you have to pay all those guys, and they don't come cheap.
THen you have to hire an editing suite for however many hours it takes for you to edit the film the way you want. Or should say, the way the director wants it, since typically such films seem to get handed over to someone outside the band (the one exception I can think of being, once again The Grateful Dead Movie, which was pretty much put together by Jerry Garcia himself). And your director probably won't come cheap either, and neither will his editor.
Then you've got to mix the music, because if you were smart, you also hired a multi-track truck (another expense) and you're gonna spend at least a few hours (hopefully more) getting the sound right, though there's a few concert films where the audio wasn't "just right" (Yessongs, anybody?).
So yeah, all that adds up to a very expensive bill. Someone has to front the money for that beforehand, either the record company, or a television network, or some other entity who believes they can either make a good profit off the project, or at least lose enough money that they can write it off on their taxes. Unless, of course, you're The Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney or someone else like that (well, McCartney was incredibly wealthy, I think The Stones were still recovering from being burned by Allen Klein, though there again, they still managed to produce a concert film in 1973 and film two other shows later in the decade, followed by another concert film at the start of the next decade).
And like I said, I don't think any of the bands "didn't care", it was just a matter of getting someone interested in fronting the money for such a project.
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