Successful artists don’t get there accidentally. It takes a mix of ability and actually exhausting work to attain success in any self-discipline. Just ask The Boss. “When it comes to luck, you make your own,” Bruce Springsteen famously mentioned.
Rising music star Teddy Swims would know. After musical theater in highschool, years taking part in in Atlanta-area cowl bands, and posting movies on YouTube of him singing in his bed room, his cowl of Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One” went viral (145 million views since its premiere in 2019) and he bought “lucky.” Warner Records signed him on the finish of that yr, and his continued exhausting work earned him spots on the late-night TV circuit and his first look on the Billboard Top 100 in June of 2023 along with his single “Lose Control” from his most up-to-date album, “I’ve Tried Everything but Therapy (Part 1).”
Teddy’s been on a global tour to help the album, taking part in at venues from massive festivals to extra intimate golf equipment throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. And as any artist who’s driving a wave of success is aware of, a well timed social media presence is important to connecting with followers regionally and globally.
Which is the place photographer/videographer Bryce Hall is available in. With a background not not like Teddy’s, his exhausting work, ability, and fervour for masking stay music occasions has likewise resulted in some “lucky” breaks. In this installment of Made in Frame, he took us on a backstage tour as he supported Teddy by giving him quicker entry to the followers utilizing Frame.io and the Camera to Cloud workflow with the FUJIFILM X-H2S.
The college of YouTube
If Teddy Swims bought his break by making YouTube movies, Bryce acquired his job expertise by watching YouTube movies—whereas he was nonetheless in highschool. “I’d go to school and do sports practice, leave early and drive an hour and a half to a major city and shoot,” Bryce says. “I’d do that two or three times a week and then by the time I graduated, I had some bands that were willing to take me on—and the rest has been kind of history.”
Bryce credit “the school of YouTube” for serving to him discover ways to function cameras and edit images and movies, and it’s one of many causes he’s so sport to embrace new gear and workflows. “I’ve kind of always been that way. Growing up, if I ever got anything electronic from my parents, I always threw the manual away because I wanted to learn everything myself,” he laughs. “And so I think that’s just transferred over into my adulthood to where I love looking up new things to learn online.”
Ten years in the past Bryce met Jeremy (Jt) Tollas, whose Michigan-based band, Famous Last Words, was actively touring the nation in vans, sprinters, and RVs. Jt was 20, Bryce was 19. Fast ahead to 2023, which discovered Jt on workers at Frame.io as a Camera to Cloud partnerships integration specialist. Bryce, now touring with bands like Slipknot and Lamb of God, has continued to journey the world taking pictures images and movies for social media, promotional supplies, and documentary movies.
Bryce was heading out on Teddy Swims’ tour and hit Jt up about Camera to Cloud. As a sort of one-man-band of picture seize, the thought of with the ability to robotically have his images accessible in Frame.io was immediately intriguing. And as a man whose day job is all about empowering creatives by means of cutting-edge expertise, the use case was simply as interesting to Jt.
Gearing up
Bryce’s cameras of alternative had been the FUFIFILM X-H2 and X-H2S with the in-camera integration to Frame.io Camera to Cloud. When taking pictures images, he makes use of both Frame.io or Lightroom to view and cull photographs. For fast video clips which have an ultra-fast turnaround (like for social media functions) he’ll minimize in Final Cut Pro, or for lengthier items (music movies or documentary-style shorts) he usually chooses Premiere Pro. And as a result of he’s touring a lot, he’s working completely off his MacBook Pro.
“The transmitters on the Fujifilm cameras work great if you have good Wi-Fi. So, if we were doing a photoshoot in a studio where we had dedicated Wi-Fi it was lightning fast. It would do exactly what it was intended to: shoot and be able to have management or the team on Frame.io seeing everything coming in—in real time,” Bryce says.
What many Camera to Cloud customers have found is that connectivity is vital to the pace of the workflow, and gearing up for the totally different venues and curveballs {that a} stay tour can current requires some preparation. Or some on-the-spot ingenuity—which Bryce isn’t any stranger to after being on tour for many of the previous decade.
“It’s not a very controlled environment when it comes to having dedicated Wi-Fi, so that was the biggest challenge because every day was different. I was in Amsterdam and had a show with Teddy at an outside amphitheater, a beautiful, beautiful venue, but the only Wi-Fi available was back near the production offices, which was relatively close but not close enough to the stage. So I had to actually transfer all those images over. On the flip side, if I was doing an arena with dedicated Wi-Fi, everything moved relatively quickly,” he explains.
Bryce sometimes shoots RAW and JPG, preferring JPG for C2C for his or her extra compact file sizes. Deliverables differ, particularly for the social media shops. “With photos, I send over all JPGs for the team to look at, and then if, for example, we want to use a photo for a poster, I will turn over TIFFs to ensure that we have the highest resolution possible for printing. For videos, most of the time I turn over mp4 files at either 1920×1080 for horizontal videos or 1080×1920 for vertical.”
Making it sing
For nearly all of the tour, the Camera to Cloud workflow made Bryce’s job considerably simpler. “In the past, I would run back and forth between the stage and my backstage area and dump footage as quickly as I could, editing as fast as I could, and running between both of those places nonstop,” he says.
The better part was it minimize my time in half, and I used to be in a position to get again out for the second half of the present with our deliverables already dealt with.
The job of the tour content material particular person is usually so simple as doing social media, and different instances as sophisticated as ensuring the entire press shops have what they should publish their present critiques every night time. “Or sometimes the artist management would take photos and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to print this photo to include it in Teddy’s vinyl pre-order and use them to upscale the preorders.’”
The new workflow not solely largely eradicated the necessity for Bryce to do all that operating, it additionally enabled him to provide the work extra rapidly and extra effectively—all on his personal.
“It’s a huge advantage to have Camera to Cloud because what I can do now is if I’m with the headlining band—let’s say they’re playing for 90 minutes—I’ll shoot for the first 25-30 minutes and if everything’s uploading to Frame, I can scan those images really quickly and make a mark on each one I like and right away move it into Lightroom, do an edit on it, and then put it right back into Frame so it can be shared with the team who will ultimately come back and pick those photos later,” he says.
One explicit instance of Camera to Cloud that stands out for Bryce was throughout Teddy’s London present. “We had a magazine outlet that wanted to showcase exclusive photos directly after the show ended, so I needed to give them final photos halfway through the set,” Bryce says. “The venue had an outstanding internet connection and I was able to run around and shoot a ton of photos from different vantage points and immediately had the photos on Frame.io, ready to review, so I could make my selections and get edits uploaded in time. The best part was it cut my time in half, and I was able to get back out for the second half of the show with our deliverables already handled.”
Bryce is a self-proclaimed over-shooter. “I usually shoot a few hundred photos a night, some nights more than others. I want to make sure I don’t miss anything.” Which is but another excuse why the flexibility to rapidly cull photographs is so very important to his success.
For Teddy’s tour particularly, Bryce was giving his crew someplace between 20 and 30 photographs, in addition to clips for TikTookay, Facebook, and Instagram reels. “Those were mainly small blurbs,” he says. “Teddy’s a very big personality, so if he said something funny backstage we’d take that clip, apply a little color grade on it, edit it very quickly and put it into a Frame.io folder as another option for them to use later on.”
The eye of the artist
What made the method extra streamlined for Bryce and for Teddy’s crew was that as a result of he had rapid entry to the pictures he was in a position to give them solely his selects from which to decide on.
“They might say, ‘Hey, shoot the first 30 minutes of a show and then get us 10 photos that we can post right away on Billboard’s site,’ so when everyone gets out of the show and is on their phone on the way home, there’s already an article written about it ready to be seen,” Bryce says. “I would go back to the room and they would already have their final selects in mind.”
Not solely does Camera to Cloud save everybody time, it additionally empowers Bryce creatively. “I only give them my top selects because they trust me as the content creator and as the photographer to know what’s gonna look right and what’s gonna sell the article or sell the experience they’re trying to portray. There’s so much on their plate that the majority of the time that they have to connect and I’m just the final piece to get an article put together. So if I had a few clips in mind I already liked, I would just transfer those over and work on those instantly. Instead of having to take, let’s say an hour, I was getting it completed in 20 minutes.”
The way forward for competition work
During the pandemic, content material creation workflows modified dramatically. Born out of the need to beat the impediment of distance, methods that enabled or reshaped distant workflows have since turn out to be extra commonplace for creators trying to conquer the impediment of time. News gathering, live sporting events and, as we’ve discovered from Bryce, stay music occasions can all profit from cloud-centric workflows.
In 2021, metallic band Slipknot resumed their annual festival, starting of their dwelling state of Iowa. “I happened to be there and their management asked me to come along,” Bryce says. “They were, like, ‘We want to get content out in real time all day.’”
Bryce was taking pictures solo on that tour, counting on good outdated sneakernet to maintain issues shifting. “The two stages were side by side, and when one got done playing there was about a five-minute break before the next act started,” he says. “Some of the opening bands only played for 20 minutes, so I’d do 10 minutes of their set, run back to the production office and dump all my footage, get together one or two photos, and then run to the other stage to start on the next band. I did that all day and we were successfully able to give them what they needed to post. And I remember at the end of the day one of the managers said, ‘I can’t believe you do this alone and do such a good job.’”
Bryce laughs. “At the time, I thought, ‘What if I had a team of two other people with me? What could we accomplish?’ Fast forward to Frame.io and Fujifilm and I realized how this could speed up a workflow to the point where you wouldn’t need a team—you actually could do it yourself.”
I can’t imagine you do that alone and do such an excellent job.
On this final tour with Teddy he found that his hunch was appropriate. “To be able to take this to a smaller festival and be able to compete at the level that some of these major festivals are not even doing yet with their content teams would be a complete game changer.”
What success seems like
Success for an artist like Teddy Swims means a number of issues: larger venues, extra consideration to his work, and the liberty to push the boundaries of his creativity.
Which is just about what it means for Bryce, as effectively. But past that, because the expertise develops we might be sure that he’ll discover new methods to push the boundaries of his workflow.
Our mission at Frame.io is to empower creators of every kind by making expertise extra accessible. Seeing a creator like Bryce embrace the expertise is all of the extra gratifying as a result of we wish others like him to be impressed to observe their ardour for capturing the moments and tales they need to inform.
We can’t wait to see the place the street leads Bryce and Teddy subsequent.
Editor’s word: Join us tomorrow at 10am PT for a stay chat with Bryce on Frame.io Live. Register here!
