The video posted is the 1990 classic “Poison” by Bell Biv DeVoe from “Ladies Night Out 2.” A R&B throwback showcase concert featuring: Bell Biv DeVoe, Jagged Edge, H-Town, Color Me Badd, Rocky Sandoval, Comedian Jay Lamont, and more. Hosted by B95’s Andre Covington and DJ D-Soto on the 1’s and 2’s. Live at the Save Mart Center. Fresno, Ca on Oct 28, 2011. I will recant the story of how this came to be.
This was an event that we didn’t know what to expect and played it by ear and turned out to be a fun and memorable night. Thanks to a hard drive of H-Town I had, it wouldn’t have prompted me to contact them to return it.
It started more than a year ago when I got a referral to re-edit a H-Town music video “Knockin’ Your Heels” featuring Jodeci and Pretty Ricky, an update to Knockin Your Boots that was mailed to me. I was told to rip footage from a low resolution DVD and mix it with an internal hard drive with RED one footage on it. Obviously, the quality isn’t compatible and it would have been a nightmare to edit. We never negotiated a price on editing and the video ended up getting re-edited, which left me with the hard drive that I didn’t want to come out of pocket to send it.
It turns out I saw H-Town was coming into Fresno for the Ladies Night Out Concert, so I thought it was a perfect opportunity to contact them about returning the hard drive that I’ve been sitting on for so long. I got in contact with H-Town and the manager and just expected to return the hard drive to the rightful owners and be on our way. To my surprise, I didn’t find out until a few hours before the show that we were invited to film and get concert/behind the scenes footage. The manager put our names up front at roll call with VIP media passes and then to be escorted backstage. We were excited and my significant other actually mentioned a few weeks before it would be a show she would want to see. Things were working out better than expected.
H-Town’s manager told us to be there at 8PM and we were running a little bit late. I was in a panic because I didn’t want to miss our window of time. We tried to park about a half a mile away until we got the idea just to drive straight down to the loading area. Just gave a little ‘head nod’ and the guard let us down to park. Voila! We walked through the back to the backstage area and said we were looking for H-Town and were instantly handed 2 VIP all access media passes! We were delighted about how smooth this was going and felt like the proper respect.
We were excited to film at the Save Mart Center because it’s usually a very strict venue in regards to allowing media. Previously, I filmed an interview backstage for Josh Paul, bassist for Daughtry, but we weren’t allowed to film the actual concert. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3EealFz3IQ It turned out to be in the same backstage room that H-Town was in. (We found out later that the Save Mart Center tried to charge H-Town $1000 to film.)
After scouting out the area looking for H-Town, I started to get in the zone and began to calculate focal length for lenses in conjunction with lighting. Shortly after, H-Town showed up and filming began! I documented their whole experience in Fresno from the beginning all of the way to when they left to the airport around 5am in the morning.
