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Posts by Andrew Prince:

Pink Floydian – Live at Marine Hall, Fleetwood

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Back in October 2023, we filmed and ran all the audio production for a Pink Floydian show at The Marine Hall, Fleetwood. We put five cameras into the venue along with our 32 channel multitrack system and used the hundreds of gigabytes of resulting digital media to produce a full concert film for the band.

In turn, the band decided to bring in their full light show and additional lasers to make the show look as good as they possibly could – as good as it sounded, we would argue!

The entire video / DVD / Blu-ray Disc production was run by Ampro Media at no cost to the band (we make our fee from the resulting merchandise sales). This unforgettable performance by the UK’s most authentic Pink Floyd tribute band was captured in all its glory and is now on general sale from the AmproLive website and the Pink Floydian website.

Does your band want a full concert film? Do you make profit from your merchandise sales? Could you sell a couple of hundred DVDs and / or Blu-ray Discs to your audience? If you answered yes to these questions, we can make such a product for you, for no cost to you, generating addition revenue for you. Get in touch!

Led Into Zeppelin – New concert video OUT NOW!

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Led Into Zeppelin are an ultra authentic tribute to none other than Led Zeppelin. We’ve just completed work on their awesome concert film and it’s now available to buy on our retail website, AmproLive.

Check out the promo film we created for the concert film, above.

For this project, Led Into Zeppelin went with our free concert film package. That is to say, we ran their FoH sound on the night which allowed us to capture a multitrack recording of the entire event for later mixing. We also ran five HD video cameras for the entire duration of the show. The result is, the concert film is now available to buy on DVD, Blu-ray Disc and Digital Download.

Of course, it didn’t cost Led Into Zeppelin a penny for this film as it’s entirely funded by sales from our retail site. What are you waiting for? Go buy it now!

facebook-events

TUTORIAL: Facebook Events

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Facebook Events are an awesome digital marketing & promotion tool!

First and most obviously, they list your event on your band page, on Facebook, for free. Every band or show should be using them all the time. But more than that, there are specific things you should think about to get maximum exposure for your event.

So what happens when you create an event? Here’s the list:

  1. The Event gets published to your bands event list on their page.
  2. Facebook puts that event on your main page, as a Facebook post, which in turn will go out to many people following your page.
  3. Facebook puts that event in front of some of your friends.

This by itself is a great place to share your band imagery, your artwork, your brand or indeed your content. But there is something far more powerful available to you with Facebook Events.

Once your event is posted, you can invite people to it. Now depending on how you have your Facebook page set up, you might be logged into Facebook on your band profile or your personal profile. The trick here is to set up an Event under your band profile but then switch to your personal profile. Once you’re in your personal profile, you can go back to your event and invite all your Facebook friends to the event.

Click the INVITE button on the event page:

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When you click the INVITE button, Facebook opens a new dialogue box that allows you to select which of your personal friends to invite to your show:

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From this box, you can select ALL FRIENDS and then select the friends in the list that you want to invite to the event. Our suggestion would be to suggest ALL your friends.

Now I know what you’re going to say… You might not want to invite all your friends because you don’t want to annoy people who perhaps live at the other side of the world or for whatever reason, would never attend your show. This is a mistake. You should absolutely invite ALL your friends! The reason?

Firstly, you won’t annoy them. They will have the option of blocking your event invites when they receive them and if they do block your invites, that’s a great thing because it qualifies your invite list for you. The same is true of unsubscribers when they unsubscribe from your email database (you DO have an email database don’t you?). Every unsubscribe means the mailing list qualifies itself to become that bit more targeted. You would much rather send 10 emails to fans of your show rather than 10,000 random emails wouldn’t you? Your database is far more powerful when it’s qualified and targeted.

The second major reason you might want to invite ALL your friends is, you friends might not respond to the invite, but there is a chance that their friends will see the event and their friends are more likely to respond or share the event if it’s also socially qualified (ie they can easily see that their friends are also going to the event or at the very least interested in it).

Think about the numbers here. If your band has 5 musicians and they all have 500 friends on Facebook, that’s 2,500 invites sent out to real people that they personally know. If each of those friends has 500 friends, then there is the potential to have your invite put in front of 1,250,000 real people on Facebook, multiple times. What’s even better is, that Event becomes associated with each person on Facebook even if they don’t respond to it and when they are looking at other events at any point in the future, there’s a good chance that your event will pop up in front of them as a possibly interesting event for them, which means multiple exposures to your band, your show, your artwork and your brand. Did we mention, all of this costs nothing? It’s completely free. Even if you get only one ticket sale from this entire exercise, you’ve just made a tenner for two minutes work!

The final thing to do when you’re setting up an event on Facebook is to make sure you use all the boxes on the event setup itself. An important one is CO-HOSTS. The host of the event is your band (assuming you set the event up on your band page) or yourself (assuming you set it up on your personal Facebook profile). But you can also add other entities on Facebook as a co-host. For example, the venue, the promoter or indeed anyone else involved in the event in an official capacity. When those entities accept the co-host (tell them about it!), this same event will be listed in their events page. You will end up with one Facebook event, centrally administered by any and all co-hosts. The promoter and venue will use that event. It will appear on their Facebook page when they want to post it easily.

Want to see it in action?

Right now, I’m on a Facebook Event page, for an event that I am a co-host on. On the side of my screen is a list of 6 suggested events.

  • 1 of those events is my own
  • 1 of those events I am a co-host on because I’m helping to promote them. If I wasn’t a co-host, Facebook would use this space to suggest another event to me.
  • All the other events are nothing to do with me BUT, they are all highly targeted because all of them are in my area and 1 of them I attended in 2022 but didn’t know it was happening again in 2023.
  • 4 of those events are “socially herding” me to them, because I can clearly see multiple friends are also attending or interested.
  • 2 of these events are happening in the next 2 days.

That’s powerful marketing!

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So you see, there are many amazing reasons to use Facebook Events and to use them properly. We haven’t even begun to dive into the posibilities when it comes to combining Facebook Events with paid digital marketing campaigns on Facebook. That’s for another day perhaps.

Would you like a video of your entire show, filmed in glorious HD quality, to sell to your audience, free of charge? Get in touch with us right now! We are looking for clients that can quickly get over the “too good to be true” issue, because right now, that’s the biggest problem we have in our business!  🙂

WHITE PAPER: DVD / Blu-ray Disc Merchandise package (free)

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The Band

Mama perform An Evening of Genesis Music, a tribute to the music of British group Genesis. The band is based in the UK and currently plays ten shows a year at venues across the country.

The band perform pieces from every era of Genesis from the early Peter Gabriel Genesis albums, right through the Phil Collins era in the 70’s and 80’s and up to the final Genesis studio album, We Can’t Dance.

Check them out here: www.mama-genesis.co.uk

An accidental project?

Here at Ampro Media, we’ve been involved with Mama since its conception. In fact, we are founder members of the band. In 2022 we were testing some new video equipment and cameras that we had bought as an upgrade to our system that we use to record full shows on behalf of clients. At the Mama show at The Met in Bury, we were running four of our five cameras to iron out any production problems we may have before we used the new system for paying clients. It was only after that show that the band saw the resulting footage and decided they would like to release a DVD of their show to sell on their merchandise desk. As the entire show was captured in mostly HD (and some 4K), this was relatively easy to do.

For audio, we happened to be running the Front of House sound for the show and so it was relatively easy for us to also capture a full multitrack of the show that could be mixed at a later date. Once the idea became reality, the band decided to mix the audio themselves, along with help from Brian Hulse. We therefore supplied the multitrack masters and set about working on the video edit itself.

So as you can see, this film really was an accident of sorts!

Planning costs = 0 hours X £0.00

The video edit was created entirely in-house at Ampro Media, along with all the titles and the entire film was graded to get the best out of the images.

Total filming costs = 6 hours X £50.00

Total edit costs = 10 hours X £50.00

Total grading costs = 15 hours X £50.00

DVD / Bluray package for free!

The band were not in a position to shell out a large sum for a full concert DVD and as previously mentioned, this project was entirely an accident to start with. Instead, we did a deal with the band where they could have the entire package for free as long as they committed to buying a number of DVDs and Blu-ray Discs from Ampro Media to cover the costs associated with creating the product.

As a side project, the band were also interested in creating a full double CD of the same concert and our multitrack recording was available to allow them to do exactly this. The CD version of their show at The Met was not produced by Ampro Media and hence was not funded by this deal with the band.

Following completion of the edit, Ampro Media engaged some professional artwork designers to create the graphics for the DVD / Blu-ray custom animated menus and the cover designs for the DVD, Blu-ray Disc and CD versions. The CD audio was dropped into the film and synced accordingly. End result? Three products the band can now sell at a profit to their audience for zero initial outlay.

The second part of the deal that we made with the band was, when the sales of the DVD and Blu-ray had covered the production costs, we would then supply those products to the band at a much reduced cost, thereby allowing them to make a much larger profit from their sales.

The end result is, the band have now got three recordings of their Last Domino Tour that they can sell to their audience at a profit, to help fund investment back into the show. What’s more, it hasn’t cost them anything.

Final thoughts?

There are many added side benefits to this style of project. For example, the band now have access to all the audio and video footage so that they can choose to create a promo video to promote the sale of the DVD / Blu-ray / CD and also a promo video to further promote their shows across the UK.

Furthermore, we have produced rendered outputs of all the tracks contained within the DVD that we can hold back over the next year or so. These tracks can be posted on the bands social media channels and website, as part of our ongoing efforts to feed relevant, good quality content to our audiences and thereby drive traffic back to our website consistently, to see what shows we have in the diary.

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Full credits from the film

MAMA
Live at The Met, Bury

Jon Vatikiotis – Guitars
David K Jones – Bass, Bass Pedals, Guitars, Vocals
James Cooper – Drums
John Wilkinson – Vocals
John Comish – Keyboards, Programming

Concert Sound & Monitors
Andrew Prince

Concert Lighting
Dave Heaton
The Met Technical Staff

Tour Crew
David Broome
Julie Thompson

Merchandise
Jan O’Connor

Video Editor & Post Production
Andrew Prince

Cameras
Barry Edwards

Video Sound Mixing
David K Jones

Video Sound Mastering
Brian Hulse

Video Created By
Ampro Media


WWW.MAMA-GENESIS.CO.UK
WWW.AMPROMEDIA.CO.UK
WWW.THEMET.ORG.UK


Mama would like to thank:
Tony, Mike, Phil, Peter, Steve

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WHITE PAPER: No Filter Promo Video

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A short promo video

No Filter are a duo, three piece, four piece and five piece band that work the bar, club and corporate / event circuits. They wanted to create a professional looking promo video for their new website to promote their music and stage show across the UK.

The band had several tracks they were working on in the studio at the time of recording. So it was agreed that the best way to create the promo video was to film multiple takes on one camera, using the backing tracks for sync in the video edit and post production.

How it was put together

A venue was chosen in South Manchester. The band supplied their half finished demos for sync and we recorded both visuals and their sync tracks live to camera. This ensured that all the video we captured was absolutely in sync with the find audio that the band would supply when they had finished their studio sessions.

We filmed multiple takes from different angles, for each track the band wanted to feature in their promo video. Then songs in all, where we just recorded a verse and a chorus. In total, the video took around four hours to shoot and the running on the day was kept brisk. Shooting with one camera also allowed us to move performers around to get specific shots that we would otherwise have been unable to achieve with shooting live on multiple cameras. The syn tracks also enabled the band to take their time getting the audio exactly how they wanted it for the video, supplying finished audio after the video edit was completed.

Total planning time:

2 hours X £0.00

Total filming time:

4 hours X £50.00

Total edit and post production time:

4 hours X £50.00

The band also saved money when doing their own audio mix. Want to see the results? Check out the video below…

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WHITE PAPER: Full Multicamera Video Production

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The band

Dark Side of The Wall are a Midlands based Pink Floyd tribute band that have been touring for over twenty five years. Known for their accurate live renditions of Pink Floyd from throughout the Floyd back catalogue, they also pay great attention to the production values of their shows, so it was with no small amount of excitement that we worked with the band to create a full concert film for them.

Check them out here: www.pinkfloydtribute.co.uk

The client: “After a couple of line up changes in recent years a new promo video was a priority project for Dark Side Of The Wall. We’ve worked with Ampro Media for a couple of years now for marketing and promoting our shows, so we knew we could put our trust in them to produce exactly what we needed at an affordable cost.”

The solution

The band initially wanted a promo video that they could use to promote their 2023 tour dates. That was the brief and we discussed several different ways that we could create such a film with minimal disruption to the band or having to take them into an expensive studio or recording location. After much discussion, it was decided that the solution that would give the most bang for their buck was to film an entire show on multiple cameras. Furthermore, to capture great audio would require a full multitrack recording of not just the band but the audience and general atmosphere of the show.

Tamworth Assemby Rooms was the venue and was chosen by the band because it would have a great crowd, great facilities and there was room back stage to position the equipment necessary for a full video and audio production system.

On the night, we live switched our programme video feed between five cameras and we could have live streamed the resulting output to a worldwide audience if required. The live video switched edit (the buttons we push on the night) was also recorded to our hard drives. And finally, we had a split running from the bands front of house console to our own console so that we could record a full 32 tracks of audio alongside several stereo atmosphere recordings that we also had running.

The entire production would be shot in full HD and in the case of some of our cameras, 4K video.

Planning costs = several hours X £0.00

The client: “When Ampro Media first spoke of filming but also editing ‘live’ as the show took place, we totally bought into the idea. To switch between the cameras live meant the saving on post production time was obvious, with only tweaks to refine the footage required as opposed to a full edit created via the hours of footage from 5 cameras.”

The benfits

The client: “The process on the night was so easy for us. We hardly knew they were there, which is what any band would want. This allowed us to concentrate on the audience and not a video crew. Having now seen what they captured and have put together for us we’re beyond thrilled.”

Recording both the live programme output from the live switch edit that we performed on the night alongside each individual camera feed (or ISO) allowed us to load the entire show into our edit facilities to make any changes to the edit that we or the band felt were required. So whilst the majority of the edit was already done, in post production we made several tweaks and changed the edit around to improve the choice of shots and generally make the edit better than it was when we recorded it on the night of the show.

Filming and recording costs = 8 hours X £50.00

The full multitrack audio recording would become crucial during the creation of the final video because it allowed us to remix the entire show specifically for video and correct any mix issues that may have occurred on the night. This method produces far better audio results for the finished film. The band had two options here, to save money:

  1. The first was for the band themselves to take our multitrack audio, remix it to sound just as they wanted it and then supply us with mastered stereo audio that we could drop into the film. This option would save the band money because we wouldn’t have had to charge for our time mixing the audio.
  2. The second option however was for us to remix the audio directly on the edit timeline and this is what the band opted for. They liked the sound we produced during post production and opted to send us notes on any minor changes that were required. We duly built those changes into the final mix.

The final touches involved us adding titles where appropriate and grading every shot in the production to correct any colour anomilies, sharpen a few shots and generally bring the image quality to where it should be. This is a complex task made even harder by the ever changing lighting at a concert. We graded a total of 1,577 shots, some of them over multiple passes. This was no small project!

Audio mix post production = 9 hours X £50.00

Grading post production = 15 hours X £50.00

The client: “Post show all we’ve contributed was suggestions regarding the audio mix and that process was also very easy with Ampro Media doing everything we asked, creating an audio mix that makes the video footage and subsequently the band, sound amazing.”

The end result

With this powerful workflow, there are many options now available to the band. First, there is the full concert film. This can be rendered out to a single YouTube video, DVD (in standard definition) and Blu-ray Disc (in high definition). As we used a professional based workflow, the quality of the final product could be packaged for sale by the band on their merchandise stall at future shows. Sales would in effect pay for the entire video production we did.

The band also requested that we split every track of the entire show into specific files so that they could upload them to their YouTube channel. This is a great idea for a number of reasons:

  1. It allows the band to share specific moments of the show with their audience on social channels and their website, which in turn drives continued engagement with their audience. This is great for future marketing and promotion in general.
  2. The band kept some of these individual tracks back from their audience, so they could drip feed content to them on their social channels over the next year or two. In short, they’d always have some great quality website and social content to share, for no additional cost.
  3. They could refer specific questions from prospective ticket buyers on social channels, to the exact track they were asking about, thereby greatly increasing the focus of their promotion with laserlike targeting of content.

The band decided that they wanted to have a go at producing their own edit of a short promo video for future use. They have access to all our media that we captured on the night including cameras and multitrack audio stems, plus the mixes we’ve created for use in the full length film we created. We estimate that this decision would save the band around 5 hours at £50.00 per hour.

Another option for the band was to create a double CD recording of the entire show, using our multitrack audio, that they could again sell to their audience to generate additional revenue streams to pay for the video production and also make a profit to offset the costs of future shows.

The client: “Without hesitation, all of us in our band would recommend this process to other bands at our level as a brilliant, affordable way of producing not just a promo video but a film of your whole concert.”

Total production costs

As you can see from the notes above, all our services are charged at £50.00 per hour. It’s that simple.

The client can choose to go with a simple package that allows them to generate a substantial amount of recorded media such as audio multitrack stems, programme video (the live switch we do during the show) and the individual camera media that we also record. Finally, there are several stereo atmosphere tracks that we record.

When it comes to the post production process, again we charge at the same rate for our services. We can do as much or as little as the client wants. A quick tidy up of the programme edit is perfectly possible with around 4 or 5 hours work. A full re-edit could just as easily be done. And the audio can be mixed by the band from our multitrack stems or alternatively left to us. Finally, grading the whole film is not absolutely necessary. We just like to grade our projects because we can get just a little more quality from the video images and make those images pop.

The bottom line is, you tell us how many hours you want us to spend working on the post production and we’ll invoice accordingly. Ultimately, our services can suit almost any budget. We’re providing broadcast quality, full video / film making services with professional quality audio, for a mere £50.00 per hour.

If you would like to know more or talk to us about your band / show and what we can do for you, simply drop us an email or contact us.

Filming, editing & post production = 32 hours X £50.00

Expenses (mostly fuel) = £68.00

Promo edit by the band

The band created a couple of promo films using the media we generated on the night and their own title sequences. These were not available when we published this white paper, but they are now, so we’d love to share them with you here!

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Free promotion on Facebook

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The power of Facebook Events

Of the many forms of promotion you can use to get your show out there to the masses, free opportunities will always give you the most value for money. It’s obvious why; even a single ticket sale is a positive result.

Facebook offers amazing marketing tools and opportunities, but a lot of people forget about the free methods or don’t use them to their full potential. Facebook Events are a great place to start. Here’s how you should do it:

Every Facebook Event that you create has the ability to be shared and presents you an opportunity to invite all your friends. Head over to the event you want to promote and look for the share button. If you click the share button, you’ll get the option to invite all friends as below.

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Why invite all your friends?

Clicking the Invite Friends button brings up a second dialogue box that allows you to select exactly which of your friends to invite. Here’s where most people come unstuck. They go through their friends list and they select all the people they think may be interested in the event. They broadly eliminate the majority of their friends because:

  • They are not in the location of the event or live outside the UK
  • They think they won’t like that kind of event
  • They think their friend will take offense at being invited
  • They think they are spamming their friends

Let’s set straight, many of these misconceptions. Firstly, Facebook is a social network. The whole point of social networks is to socialise, which is no different to say, going to your local pub with friends. If you went to the pub with your friend and you were discussing your lives and what’s happening in them, you’d likely mention that you are going to a show later in the week. Yet, you wouldn’t expect your friend to take offense or feel like they are being spammed. It’s a misconception that your friends will take offense to your event invites. At worst, they will just ignore them.

What does Facebook do with my invitations?

But here’s the clever bit – Facebook does lots of cool things with your event invites. Obviously Facebook puts your event directly in front of your friend, but it also does this again, nearer the time of the event, so really it’s giving you a second invite to bolster your audience numbers. Another thing it does is it adds the event to your friends news feed which is shown to their friends. For example, one of your friends might click the “interested” button and their friends will potentially see that action, which means you just reached a friend of a friend that you couldn’t reach before.

Even if the friend you are inviting lives on the other side of the world, chances are, that friend has connections around your area (they’re connected to you, right?). There’s every chance that your friend on the other side of the world might think, “Oh, I am not interested in this event, but Susie might love it! I’ll send her an invite.”

Finally, it’s also entirely possible that your invite might provoke some discussion offline which is a great thing. Pub anyone?

But here is the real reason you want to literally invite all your friends to your events… If you have a ten piece band and each band member has around 300 Facebook friends, that’s a 3,000 strong audience you can reach without spending a penny on marketing and promotion! More to the point, this entire audience is already connected to you, your band or one of your band members. They’re effectively a pre-qualified audience that you already have a relationship with!

Here’s how you complete the process:

In the pop up dialog box, simply select All Friends under the Suggested heading, click Select All and then click Send Invitations. Job done.

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Seriously, why wouldn’t you?

So what about those who don’t want to spam their friends? Well, it’s worth considering how your friends and indeed Facebook itself handles those instances. Firstly, if your friends are going to react negatively, the most likely thing they will do is simply ignore your invite. Nothing lost. The second most likely thing they will do is click the option to not receive any more of your invites and that is a very cool thing. Why? Because from now on, you cannot possibly spam your friend again and you have nothing to worry about. A friend that actively blocks your invites is never going to buy a ticket to see your show so again, nothing lost.

The absolute worst case scenario you might run into is, your friend sends you a message back telling you that you’re spamming them. If this happens, just be friendly right back to them and even apologise. Maybe also explain that you only invited them to try and spread the word far and wide, because you really want your event to work. Then, simply advise them that they can easily block your events if they like. Not much lost.

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Photos from Heswall Hall shows

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At the weekend, Mama performed two shows at Heswall Hall on The Wirral. Both shows were sold out and we had a cracking audience, which really made for a great show all round.

On top of that, Moonshot also debuted their brand new album on the Saturday night which went down really well!

Friend of the band, Peter Lovatt was kind enough to shoot some photos for us at both shows. Check them out below!

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New Meat Loaf tribute show for 2020

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Ampro Media to work with brand new tribute to Meat Loaf

All Revved Up are a brand new eight piece tribute to the music of Meat Loaf & Jim Steinman, featuring the voice of Peter Young. Having put the band together over the last six months or so, Peter was looking for help booking and promoting shows for the band, as well as a live sound engineer, website expertise and production for the shows.

Seems like he bumped into the right guys then? A chance meeting led him to Ampro Media who are a perfect fit for All Revved Up, because we can deliver pro audio, pro video, all the production elements of a show (PA hire etc) and all the digital marketing & promotion one could throw at such a project.

The above promo video was put together with some footage we shot at the bands launch show at The Haymarket Theatre in Leicester. We shot the whole show on three cameras, to make the edit a bit more interesting than a single camera shoot. We didn’t have a lot of control over the audio as we were not handling the concert sound at this particular show.

Here at Ampro Media, we’re looking forward to putting some 2020 shows in the diary for All Revved Up, handling practically everything except what happens on stage. Should be fun!

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