Snail - The Joker

Snail performs “The Joker“ at the Catalyst in 2000. The show was recorded with 5 cameras but went into storage for 10 years. In working on The Catalyst documentary project recently, Michele Benson presented us with a box of tapes; Beta SP, Hi8, and miniDV - many unlabeled. We managed to resurrect the entire 4 hour show of The Chokes and Snail. We initially found all of the video from all 5 cameras and were able to sync everything up, but the audio was unusable. But then we discovered a couple of DAT tapes with the board mix, which were very clean. To clean really, and sterile like board feeds usually are. But then we discovered the last video tape was a Hi8 video tape that ran uninterrupted for the entire show and recorded the room sound. By itself, it would not have been very good, but when you combine it with the DAT audio, it was a perfect blend, particularly when you run them through some modern DSP like Universal Audio UAD2 Plugins! Denise Gallant edited the video. Snail is featured in “The Catal