Sean, my brother, is the director of the dotmatrix project which is kicking off on April 24th, 2008 at The Burro, in Greensboro, NC. Sean has taken the pill and is opening himself up to the music industry and dissecting the ridiculous nature of the music labels on his blog. It is a great read if you have any interests in music.

What is the dotmatrix project? Here is the outline from the site.

Beginning in April we’ll be putting on a monthly show at The Green Burro in downtown Greensboro, building upon the collaborative format of ConvergeSouth Music 2007.

Along those lines, we’re actively working to align with folks within Greensboro’s diverse creative communities, particularly photographers, filmmakers and musicians, to plan live events where each community can contribute to the promotion of the others by simply performing and creating art.

Here’s the ballpark concept for the project so far:

Pre-Performance

• The film and photo community leads book media creators interested in participating
• The creative team and sound engineer meets with the band(s) to collaborate on ideas and discuss strategy

The Performance

• The musicians play their set and sell enough merchandise to become filthy rich
• The filmmakers shoot songs, green room banter, the audience, etc.
• The photographers shoot the event
• A multi-track recording is made of the show
• The audience contributes by shooting via cell phones, cameras, whatever and uploads their media to specific spots online

Post-Performance

• The filmmakers edit together their videos based on pre-performance conversations, taking audience submitted media into consideration
• The photographers, well, they make each shot look great and tag/post them to flickr
• The sound engineer will mix down the recorded performance to a live CD format

Promoting the Hell out of Everything

• Our new media peeps will post the final videos across numerous online spots and distribute meat space copies of the video to regional public access channels and networks to promote the event, filmmakers, the band and original music in downtown Greensboro
• Every three months we’ll put on a photo exhibit of the best shots from the previous three shows to promote local photography and original music in… you guessed it, downtown Greensboro
• We’ll also register each show recording with Creative Commons before uploading the tracks to numerous spots online, including the Internet Archive and Last.fm. The band will get the master for duplication purposes.
• We’re going to use each event as an opportunity to pimp media created at prior events, as well as educate the audience about how each of them can support indie artists by using the web

Sounds cool huh? What is my role with this? I’m helping my brother get in touch with the filmmaking community, in Greensboro or in NC. Please contact me to let me know if you are down to film the show or if you would like to edit.

Here’s an idea for all the editors around the world, we are thinking about posting the raw footage online with the mixed audio so you will be able to download the footage and edit together a smoking piece for the band. Especially if you like them. Open to ideas to make this an incredible project. Please feel free to leave some ideas.