Cropped Out is a music festival that assembles unclassifiable, skull-scratching, improbable, and iconoclastic DIY musicians, artists, and weirdos for a celebration of the musical edges that have been traditionally “cropped out of the conversation.” It takes place along the Ohio River on the sprawling, crumbling campus of an imagined haunted country club.

Our Challenge

Though the festival is well-attended and regarded, little priority has been given to visual documentation, which poses challenges in booking and marketing the event.

 The Approach

Since Cropped Out is such a unique entity, we decided to capture as much of the music, aesthetic, and character through a short documentary. We wanted not only to create an artifact, but to give curious people a sense of Cropped Out's sights, sounds, and ethos. And hopefully shift that curiosity to participation in years to come.

“I remember all of us laughing a whole lot. At Cropped Out, there is kind of a sense of surprise every 15 minutes - it is impossible to get bored. You never know what's coming at you next - a really beautiful serene moment on the pier at sunset leads to sweaty people flailing around on each other leads to insistent but patient blankets of sound that offer unexpected space for meditation which leads to folk music legends twisting their most heart-wrenching sets into filthy comedy routines. Even though you're working, it consistently renews, rewards, and recharges open hearts and brains.”

- Casey Chalmers, Executive Creative Director

 Results

Cropped Out hosted a screening of the documentary at a local dive bar for a crowd that ate it up. But the major win for the Cropped Out team was that while courting their wish-list of bands, sharing the video helped seal the deal in booking some reclusive, retired, unlikely, and far-flung musicians.