In this age of inexpensive digital cameras, editing software and Youtube, almost anyone can become a filmmaker—which is precisely the problem. Every minute, another 100 hours of footage is uploaded to the site, and most of it is unwatchable. So when asked to review a John Mayer documentary produced by a fan, I thought, “There’s no way this is going to be good.” Fortunately, I was wrong.
Eastwood Allen is the brain behind Someday I’ll Fly, a 66-minute documentary about Mayer. Allen is a professional TV editor, but this is a passion project. Since it’s not official in any sense, all of the clips in the documentary were collected from Youtube and fan forums—Allen watched hundreds of hours of footage. The final project folder was 475 gigabytes, with 350 performance clips and 127 songs.
“The two main points I wrote down early on were ‘influences’ and ‘musical evolution’ which then became the framework,” Allen says. “I wanted to feature John’s influences as much as I could, with the idea of the story coming full circle at the end—the ‘heroes’ that inspired him during his youth were sharing the stage with him later in life.”
“I wanted to ignore the periphery of Mayer which has often been the main focus in the public domain— his celebrity status and high profile girlfriends. I’ve never really cared for that aspect in artist’s lives which can sometimes overshadow their talent. The reason we know Mayer in the first place is because of his guitar playing and his songs.”
Guitar geeks will dig this doc, because there is a ton of great fretwork to watch. “It is maybe a little self-indulgent in that respect,” Allen says. “But to me, nothing beats the sound of a live guitar.”
Check it out here: