LXAM on the Red

Eric Peters

2 days ago

3 min read

LIVE SET SERIES · ST. BONIFACE, WINNIPEG

ONE SET

ONE SUNSET

ON THE RED

LXAM · TACHÉ PROMENADE DOCKS · AUGUST 2026

https://youtu.be/EPfScsN7KaI?si=FNlvXm6DM9tQEGtP

A one hour DJ set, six cameras, and roughly forty five minutes of usable light. Everything about this shoot came down to knowing exactly when the sun was going to leave.

60

MINUTE SET

06

CAMERAS ROLLING

03

CREW ON DECK

01 —

THE LOCATION

The public docks at Taché Promenade sit on the St. Boniface side of the Red River, looking straight back across the water at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the downtown skyline. It is one of the few spots in Winnipeg where you can put a DJ booth down and have a backdrop that needs no dressing at all.

It is also completely public. That was the deal we accepted going in. No road closure, no cordon, no crowd control. Just a set of floating docks on a warm August evening with the river walk busy behind us.

02 —

THE SETUP

Six cameras across three operators, built so that nothing critical depended on anyone being in the right place at the right moment. For a single continuous take of a live performance, redundancy matters more than coverage.

A AND B CAMERA 2 x Blackmagic BMPCC 6K. One locked wide holding the river and the skyline, one locked tight on the decks. These carried the edit.	ROAMING iPhone 16 Pro Max on gimbal, operated by Skye Spence. Fast, small, and invisible to a crowd of strangers walking past.
TEXTURE DJI Action 5 and GoPro Hero 12. Mounted low and close for hands, faders and water level angles that the main bodies could not get to.	AERIAL DJI Mini 4 Pro, sub 250g, flown within visual line of sight and authorised through NAV DRONE. Everything downtown sits inside the CYWG control zone.

Lighting was a single Aperture 300X as key, pushed through a large softbox with a grid on it. The grid was the whole point. On an open dock with the public walking behind you, an ungridded source spills everywhere and lights the river walk instead of the artist. Gridded, it stayed on LXAM and let the sky do everything else.

Crew was three. Skye Spence on gimbal, Gabe Bell on assist and behind the scenes, and myself directing and running the locked bodies and the aircraft.

03 —

WHAT THE LIGHT DID

A one hour set at the end of an August day does not give you a one hour look. Sunset landed around 8:47pm and civil twilight closed out around 9:26pm, which meant the frame changed completely three times inside a single continuous performance.

That is the part worth planning for. The set does not stop so you can adjust, so the exposure plan has to be built before anyone presses play. Golden hour, the drop into blue, and then a fully artificial look carried entirely by the key. Three distinct sections of one take.

You do not get to pause a live set to chase the light. You decide in advance which forty five minutes you are shooting for, and you build everything else around that window. — ERIC PETERS, DIRXECP

The public element turned out to be an asset rather than a problem. Strangers slowed down on the river walk, stopped, and stayed. None of it was staged and none of it was directed, and it reads that way on camera. A DJ set with a real audience that assembled itself is a very different thing from an empty location with a booth in it.