We hit up the Onscene crew to find out more about their series where they have been documenting the diverse music scene within Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, they’ll be bringing their iconic gonzo style down to the Cobb this year.

Onscene began documenting music events in Wellington earlier this year, their output has been extremely consistent but maintains a very high quality and attention to detail. They have been publishing documentaries all across the genre spectrum, capturing the current era that the wider Wellington music community finds itself in.

Their team were already making films and had been attending gigs for some time, so it seemed natural to use these tools to contribute to the scene in a different way. Someone said to them “the scene must be seen”, so the project was birthed and they jumped in headfirst.

We are very excited to welcome them to the Twisted team this year, they will be documenting the festival in their classic format so you’ll see them around with big cameras and may even be asked for an interview!

We asked them a few questions to find out more, so keep reading for a bit of interviewception.

Any stand out moments from the bloopers you can share with us?

Most of the bloopers we leave in because we have total control over the final video. A funny thing (not really that funny, ignorant and stupid actually) that happened was a fire extinguisher being used at a gig that was in a flat 5 stories up on Dixon street. The entire building was rigged with evacuation speakers on every corner that began to scream. The sound was so ridiculously loud and everything descended into chaos as we all ran through the chemical smog and made it outside. The whole chronicle was recorded and made it into “ ReType presents Trap House Mansion 2”.

What are the things that all the gigs you’ve covered have shared?

All gigs share… music… and people… dancing … and working… socialising… a cross contamination of collaborative labour and hedonistic pleasure. Read that in a Hunter S. Thompson voice.

What's your usual setup and how have you found ‘man on the street’ within a venue/night life context?

Our usual setup is host man Thom with the mic and Louis on main cams, with Izzy on the second camera getting d floor footage while the interviews happen.

Being a man on the street is interesting, a lot of similar content I see out there is really exploitive and incendiary so I take many steps to avoid that by; getting enthusiastic consent ;D, avoiding visibly intoxicated people (this goes for camerapeeps also) and by being like a dope chill mfer. I do a decent amount of research on artists just for like structural questions, then from there the conversation will usually veer off into some strange interesting direction that is somehow super relevant and interesting. Then from there the videos just assemble themselves from nothing, idk how, some entity puts them together I assume - not sure :/.

What's the plan for twisted if you’d like to share?

Our plan is to approach it pretty similar to a normal onscene video. We will shoot one day and one night because we are regular humans who want to kick-back on new years like everyone else. So yea it’ll be a ‘day in the life of Twisted’ type thing.

What are you most looking forward to about twisted/documenting it?

This is a hard question to answer as Twisted is an amalgamation of great things, with I guess the stand out aspect being the music, followed closely by the people, the party culture, the sun, the trees, the river, and the perfectly tuned sound systems. We are looking forward to immersing ourselves in this world and then attempting to capture it in some kind of accurate and fun way we hope.

Massive thanks to the Onscene peeps for these insights. Well intentioned documentation is so important when it comes to events like Twisted, we are looking forward to seeing what they cook up and so should you!