Stream The YouTube Music Awards And Revisit The Improvised Weirdness

The YouTube Music Awards premiered this past Sunday, and if you missed the wonderful mess of livestreaming weirdness you now have the chance to get caught up and see the epic performances by M.I.A., Arcade Fire, and more.

The whole show is now available at your fingertips above, and a closer watch may unveil how complicated the spectacle really was. Not only were scripts thrown out in favor of improvised dialogue, but the event itself took place at Pier 36, a non-traditional awards space filled with a variety of sets that became "live music videos" throughout the night.

To accomodate the set-up, the live show director, John Gonzales, and his epic team used new shooting techniques and adapted TV blocking, staging and communications tactics to fit the very different needs of the film set.

For example, an innovative strategy was developed to allow seamless transitions among sets and stages. While short awards segments were broadcast, the four cameras dedicated to the music video unit were repositioned to the next set, prime lenses and other equipment were changed, and cameramen hurried to new positions on the next set.

Also, since these were live music videos, coloring, shading and the touch-up process that takes eons in post-production had to be molded to work with the live environment.

Each stage's lighting was set up so it received raw data from the cameras and the shading would change to correspond with F-stop and lenses. As a result, each music video was given a unique color, lighting and texture. The M.I.A. cut "Come Walk With Me" looks like it was shot in a different studio than Laura Stirling's "Crystallize," yet both were captured in real time at Pier 36.

The award show's producer, Robb Wagner, also shared some anecdotes about how complicated shooting this event really was. "We needed to give our director of photography, Chris Blauvelt, a cinema camera team to support the digital cinema cameras on our live set," he told us. "This proved challenging. On a typical live broadcast each camera is a one or two man operation at most. But whereas the broadcast camera originally specified for the show weighed 16 pounds, the cinema cameras we ended up using weighed over 40 pounds." Now picture the operators sprinting with the behemoth gear 300 feet from stage to stage through a crowd of 1200 music fans. "We had to do it and we made it work," said Wagner.

To say the set-up was complicated is an understatment, and we can only begin to imagine how the show will top itself next year. See some exclusive, behind-the-scenes photos below and get an extra peek into the brains behind the event.