Proposal Week6

Working Critique Week3 Expanded Proposal

Visual Guide to Metro Performers

Sha Huang

Issues between subway performers and passengers have occurred in many cities: public space has been occupied, passengers have been disturbed, performers “force” passengers to watch their performances. This project will be a video collection containing multiple kinds of underground music performances. For people who live in cities that recently built a subway or have no subways, New York underground music performances could be a good way to show good relationship and balance between performers and passengers. At the same time New York underground music performance has already become a big part of this city and its city history. Via this video, I hope to give them a visual tour to New York underground music performance.

Not every city has metro transportation and not every metro system has underground music performance. A 5 minutes documentary based video will be my project, I will record them as a bystander. As Music Underground New York already gave some information about the heat station to see their performances, I will be able to find them at certain time. The focus of my videos will be instrumental and vocal performers. I will record and edit the video for this project

To find out where the performers are and when they will perform will be a big problem, so this is a time consume work. With this project I hope to sharpen my skill at video editing and see how far cellphone can video goes.

Since New York City is home to all kinds of music, metro performance on the subway can be a symbol of this city. To study more about metro performance is a good way understand the harmony of this city too.

What I am doing is a video collection of different performers. As a personal goal, I hope to push my editing skill to the next level. In my final format, I will shoot as many kinds of performers as I can, I cannot give a number because it is a time costuming work to find and video the performers.

For this project, I will use my cellphone to shoot and PC to produce. Recording with my cellphone will give me the same video format to edit. This is a very popular way for people to record nowadays, so I want to see how far I can go with its capability.

New York has influenced almost every modern music performer. “If one music style could survive in New York, this music style could survive in the world.” I read this quote from a documentary about Jonathan Lee, a Taiwan musician. Simply put, I like to listen to all kinds of music, and once I moved to New York, I saw that there are kinds of music performance I have never seen before.

Metro music performance has its history. Issues between performers, passengers and station managers become news from time to time, especially cities which have built metro systems more recently. Now and then, we see news about performers who occupy public areas to perform and “force” passengers to watch. Some people think it is an issue between performer and government, others think it is problem between passengers and performers. Personally, I think New York is a good example to show the good relationship between passengers and performers: performers use a public area to play music and passengers have fun with them. A lot of video that contains individual performers on the subway have been shot by amateurs and uploaded to social media, many academic essays have been published.

For residents in cities that recently built a subway or have no subways, music performances in the New York City underground could be a good example of the relationship and balance between performer and passenger. Underground music performance in the New York subway is a big part of this city and its city history. Through this video collection, I hope to provide a visual tour of New York underground music performance.

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