Behind “Amanda Palmer Sounds Off”
My friend and colleague Jennifer Vineyard and I recently finished working on this Amanda Palmer artist profile for Uncensored Interview. They will be featuring it on uncensoredinterview.com in the next few days. Amanda Palmer and her management should be sharing it on her various online profiles as well, I believe.
Prior to working on this piece, I had only known of Amanda Palmer through The Dresden Dolls. I wasn’t a huge fan of that band so I came into this assignment with my usual “giterdone” attitude. After watching her tapes over and over and doing additional research via her Twitter account, I am much more interested in listening to her music — she’s a smart lady with a lot to say. She tours constantly and is always involved with an interesting creative project. Her fans are pretty creative too.
It’s always interesting to work with footage that I experience only in the edit (not as a shooter or producer). Luckily, Jennifer had produced some of the interviews so she was more familiar with the material than I was. We spent a significant amount of time going through tape and figuring out what bits and pieces made sense together. Fortunately, Amanda Palmer is charming and has a lot to say. She also seems to genuinely care about her fans. When I feel like an artist actually loves his/her craft and consciously works on strengthening his/her connection with an audience, it’s always a lot more fun to work with them.
This piece is a little over seven minutes long. We had hours of tape and a lot of it was really interesting, however these portions felt the most compelling. Amanda’s management sent us press photos to use and also permission to access images from her Flickr account. We also were able to feature a few seconds from two music videos, which I cut into the pieces pertaining to Guitar Hero and Oasis.
A lot of “fan interaction” tactics that mainstream artists use these days reeks of insincerity. You can see right through it to their label’s 360 promo strategy and it is so fake.
I like it when an artist (ON HIS/HER OWN!) challenges his/her fans to create things on their own, to think for themselves and to examine their place in the world. Although it’s obvious that Amanda Palmer is just as shrewd as the next social media “expert,” she uses her promo savvy to market her content in a way that actually feels honest. You get the feeling that she would continue to do this, even if she wasn’t making any money and didn’t have a lot of fans.
Amanda Palmer’s first solo album “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” was released last year. She has a related book also called “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” that features weirdly awesome photos of herself posing dead. There is also a “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” DVD that features music videos for every single song on the album, plus cool extras