The Busking Project - Documenting Street Performance Worldwide

Dear friends, fans, buskers and browsers, We have filmed in 40 cities on 5 continents, and have made it home, safe and almost sound. We filmed hundreds of street performances, and we know you want to see more. That’s why we created the following video. I promise you’ve never seen a street performer video like [...]

View of Burrard Bridge from Granville Island    In September The Busking Project filmed on Granville Island in Vancouver, Canada. Traditionally, buskers go to Granville Island to perform because of the general support for buskers there as well as for the convenience of the regulated busking system, which is managed by The Granville Island Buskers [...]

They say pet owners adopt the characteristics of their pets, or maybe it’s the other way round. On The Busking Project we have no pets (there was Trevor the Tortoise for a few days but that is a different story), but we do spend far too much time with our filming equipment. Our Zoom H4 [...]

Six days on the trans-Siberian, from Beijing to Moscow. An opportunity to edit videos, catch-up on logging, write blogs, treatments, outlines, fund raising bids, and performer pages. But also a chance to sit, reflect, and worry. Filmmaking is an artistic process where you have to first create the tools you will later use to make [...]

The Busking Project is in Jakarta, Indonesia – two months, nine destinations, many hours of footage, and a long way from home. If you look on our website, at the performer profiles from Lisbon, and compare them to the latest videos from Athens and Istanbul, I hope you will agree that we have learned a [...]

Each time I sit down—exhausted—to edit together another clip for Vimeo, the experience is humbling: most of our shots are unusable. Surrounded by talent and success (for if you measure success by one’s ability to meet one’s goals, many street performers are triumphant), I’m beginning to feel prosaic, clumsy, unreliable. Normally, I am fine with [...]

We have been on this trip for a month, and I have been reduced to the level of a preschooler. I now leave the house without a phone, wallet or keys, nor enough money to make any sizeable dent into our daily budget. Various losses have proven that I cannot be trusted with anything important; [...]

Several people have asked us to help them set up for a travelling documentary of their own. Our Time Management post should have put them off. For those who are still interested, here’s a list of what we’ve taken with us. They are of varying importance, and although it looks like a lot, all this [...]

After this paragraph, close your eyes for a second, and picture yourself travelling around the world filming street performers for a documentary. You have little experience and few contacts, and your team consists of just three people. You are limited to five days in each city, with about two days of travel in between. What [...]

The 8th March may have been our official start, but The Busking Project really began back in early 2010. It has been my job to fit the logistical jigsaw together: London to Lisbon to Marrakech to Barcelona and then across the globe. We’re travelling overland. I struggled with visas, closed borders, and weather systems. I know about [...]