who we are
One Take New York makes video documents of bands we love playing a song they love somewhere in New York City — in one take, of course. We don’t make music videos. No moody stares into the lens, no wind machines, and no lip-synching. We want to capture a happening, an unrepeatable moment, as if the band was performing not for an audience but for itself. We prefer spontaneity and serendipity and the happy accident. We want to capture a singular experience, a performance the band’s never given and will never do again. And we will capture that experience in a single take (unless we ask you to do it again). We encourage bands to choose the song it performs and the place they perform it. The song can be an original or a cover — it just has to be meaningful to the band, and when possible plays off the place the band chooses.
We encourage the musicians to play the song in a way they have never tried before (acoustic, a cappella, on spoons). We also encourage bands to choose a place they’ve never been but have always wanted to go in New York (outdoors or indoors). We want bands, even those who live here, to experience the city as a tourist, open to the unfamiliar and unexpected. When necessary, of course, we can offer suggestions for unlikely places to rock. Above all, we consider this an opportunity for whimsical, inspired collaboration, where the band does its thing the way it wishes and we simply happen to be there to record it. For examples, go to http://www.takeawayshows.com, the filmmaker Vincent Moon’s site and the original, Parisian incarnation of this idea. Our work has been appearing on this site since April 2007.
