A Your Stories in Song event
We hadn’t live-streamed for a while using Streamyard, something we did a lot during lockdown, so paid our mate and all round clever techy sound guy and MC, Neil Povey to come and help us for this event. Philippa and Michael Vine very kindly allowed us to use the Bluebell Farmhouse Kitchen, the usual homr the monthly Bluebell Roots gig which made for a lovely venue – light, spacious and warm as they’d stuck some logs on the wood fired Esse.
Neil arrived with a TV monitor for us so we could see online comments as they came up, laptop, sound desk and a set up so we had mics for performing and separate mics for speaking which made for much better sound quality than we’d managed before. In the past we had been in separate locations and appeared virtually on screen together, us broadcasting from our home Wifi, Neil from his, but here it would have taken up too much bandwidth to have all of us on screen together so the audience only heard Neil’s voice from behind the camera while he did all the clever stuff with on screen text, sound etc.
The idea behind live-streaming was to make this Your Stories In Song event accessible to those who cannot get to any of our physical gigs. One thing that came out of our discussions with community groups when discussing these events was that there are still people not wanting to go out since covid restrictions were lifted. Also, in rural areas there are those that just don’t like driving in the dark but many of them are able to watch Facebook videos or YouTube on TV. We have family and friends abroad so timed it later in the evening so they could watch at a decent hour in the day. Also, some people we know here don’t finish work until late so they had a chance to tune in too. And we did get a really good number of people viewing.
The whole event is still available to view on YouTube – it went out live on Facebook and on YouTube and you can see some of the comments as they appeared on the night. Our friend, Jade joined us in the virtual studio from her home to chat a bit between songs and she did some dancing to the last number. Although we didn’t get feedback during the event of stories for the project, we got the word out there and promoted the online database so hope to get some after the event. We did also feel that there was a nice community feel to the event with some of those watching exchanging comments with eachother as well as us.
Setting up Streamyard can be a little complicated if you don’t have the right operating system on your mobile, as we discovered, but that was soon sorted. We still had an account with logos and banners set up and had spent a bit of time in advance creating banners with the song titles in the order we were going to play them. Neil had to think on his feet though as we had to skip a couple of songs as we were going over time.
In the past, live-streaming has been very stressful because you are trying to do all of the technical stuff, perform and reply to comments and keep an eye on the time. Having Neil take over everything except the performance was just brilliant and made it a much more relaxed and enjoyable event.
You pay a monthly subscription to use Streamyard (about £25) with the logos etc but there is a free version (well there used to be, you’d need to double check that now). Check it out here: https://streamyard.com/ If you fancy talking to Neil about working together on a livestream, his website is http://www.djneilpovey.co.uk/
The advantages of using Streamyard are obviously that you are broadcasting live to multiple platforms and can be picked up from anywhere in the world, potentially reaching a very wide audience; the recording can be kept on those platforms or deleted as you like; you get to interact with viewers in realtime; you do have the option of up to 10 ‘guests’ joining you on screen in the virtual studio. You can also set up a countdown on Youtube and an Event on facebook so there are plenty of promotional opportunities in advance of the event.
Disadvantages are the time it takes to set up and manage during the broadcast – ideally you want an extra person handling the tech side; the possibility of the internet slowing or going down; time lag between video and audio with ‘guests’ in the virtual studio; it’s live so things can go wrong. But, when you finish the event you can go back and edit then re-upload to social media if necessary.
It’s not something we’ll do very often but it is useful on occasions and we’re very proud of those that we did during lockdown which are a great record of a uniquely creative time during an extremely difficult and unsettling time in all of our lives.
Watch March event now. See our past lockdown livestreams on this Playlist.