A small town music revival: Ashland

I started working on a documentary last year about the music scene in Ashland. It was a blast going around and filming street musicians, the open mic nights at Alex's, Stillwater, and a little at Northwest Pizza, and the school's music concerts.

However, my group got lazy and we never really finished it. It was a huge undertaking and we ended with a 10 minute project out of 6-8 hours of footage.

So I had a dream the other night involving this old project and Beyonce's "All the Single Ladies" and my first thoughts upon waking were that I needed to finish this project once and for all. Now I feel like I know what I need to do to make it better and it might involve Beyonce's music video somehow.

But what I really wanted to do after I woke up the other morning was do it as an ethnographic study. I might have been delirious from studying for 6 hours straight the day before for my Anthropology final, but that's what I decided. I talked with my friend, who's an anthropology major later that day and she started to get excited about it, too.

So then I mentioned it to my Anthropology professor, Dr. Anne Chambers and what she thought of it as an ethnographic study of the community of musicians within Ashland and she thought it was totally cool too. So that got me even more excited, and THEN on top of all that, my friend who I was talking with, Melissa, already proposed it as her ethnographic study...

So now it's beginning to have this snowball effect, that I'm totally digging. Just in time for winter term I guess... (I know bad pun...)

So I'm going to upload some of the footage I have on my computer at the moment from the Guitar Ensemble concert that I went to last spring. Please forgive the choppy audio and the rough cut (I'm uploading from imovie...). I'm not going to talk technical, because it's terrible but I really like this segment of interview, because I was really impressed with how candid these guys were with me. I had never met them before, but I went to the concert with my friend Kacey and made her hold the boom mic for me... Afterwards we did a couple of interviews with students and this was some of the footage I ended up with.

:)