Beastie Boys Concert Film Put Hi-8s in Crowd's Hands

by James Murray
Published on Jan 23, 2006 4:00 PM



January 23, 2006 - Last week at the Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City the Beastie Boys premiered their new concert video, Awesome; I F*ckin’ Shot That. The New York-bred hip-hop trio has set their project apart from the often tedious genre with an innovative approach: handing the cameras over to the audience.

At an October 9th, 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden the band distributed fifty Sony Hi-8 camcorders to the crowd. Adam Yauch, band member and director of the project, gave only one instruction – keep the tape running. The result is a ninety-three minute film with 6,732 cuts.

Yauch, who directed Awesome… under his frequent pseudonym Nathaniel Hornblower, decided on a collage structure, destroying the linear pan shots so often found in standard concert film. Instead, he favored the mixing and sampling style that infuses in the band’s music. This approach resulted in the unusually large number of shots and cuts, the longest shot of the film lasting about one minute.

The Beastie Boys have gained recognition for their pioneering influences over rap music, constantly evolving from their punk-ish incarnation to mainstay hip-hop classics like Paul’s Boutique to the jazz-flavored 1996 album In Sounds From Way Out. They released a greatest hits album, Solid Gold Hits, late last year.

Awesome… will be released by Think Film, which has scored recent hits with Murderball, Born into Brothels, and The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys. The concert film is set to open in select cities on March 31, with the DVD following a few months later.