Showcasing one of Michigan’s hidden gems
Emerald Isle Irish Feile - Beaver Island, Michigan · 2025
Some assignments ask you to show up. This one asked us to get on a very small plane first.
Beaver Island sits 32 miles off the coast of Charlevoix in Lake Michigan — a tight-knit community of a few hundred year-round residents with a rich Irish heritage dating back to the 1840s. Every year, the island hosts the Emerald Isle Irish Feile, bringing in Irish artists and musicians to celebrate that history in a setting unlike anywhere else in the Midwest.
In March 2025, we were brought in to talk about their 2025 festival for both photo and video to happen later that fall — a four-day trip to one of the more remote destinations in Michigan. Getting there meant a small charter plane. Like, really small. It sets the tone for the whole experience: this isn't a standard event gig. You pack light, you stay flexible, and you commit fully once you're out there.
The Challenge
Condensing a multi-day festival into a 2–3 minute video is always a puzzle. There's music, community, history, landscape, and personality all competing for the same limited runtime. The real question isn't what to include — it's what to leave out.
Add to that the logistical reality of island life: when weather moves through upper Michigan, it doesn't ask for your schedule. This particular September, delays disrupted travel for several artists and guests for the first day of the festival, which meant our original plan for coverage needed to shift before it even began.
The Approach
When the plan changes, you don't freeze - sure, you can pause - but you find the new story. Rather than chasing what we had originally mapped out, we let the festival reveal itself on its own terms. The community's warmth, the performers who made it despite the delays, the particular character of a celebration that happens on an island 32 miles from the mainland — that became the through-line.
Working as a two-person documentation team in a space like Beaver Island requires a kind of shorthand. You can't be everywhere, so you have to trust each other's instincts and stay in the pocket of whatever is unfolding in front of you. Some of the strongest moments came not from planned setups, but from being present and ready. An artist would do something you didn’t planned. A patron would toast to one another after a song. Since we were on a shorter time frame for the festival, we needed to cover more ground, thus the divide and conquer strategy was used
Three main lessons learned:
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1. Adapt early, not late.
When circumstances shift, the instinct is to hold on to the original plan as long as possible. The better move in this case is to release it quickly and redirect your energy toward what the day is actually giving you. The festival still had a great story — it just wasn't the one we arrived expecting to tell.
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2. Trust the story to find you.
Over-directing an event shoot works against you. The more you chase a predetermined shot list, the more you miss what's actually happening. Keep the fundamentals, but stay present and loose. When you're a two-person team, that was critical and meant we caught moments that no amount of planning could have scripted.
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3. Small teams move well in small spaces
Beaver Island isn't a convention center. The intimacy of the location called for an intimate approach. Two people, minimal gear, no footprint — it let us get close to performers and community members in a way that a larger crew simply couldn't.
Project Team
Client: Emerald Isle Irish Feile
Crew: Bo Parker & Brian Simmermacher
Deliverables: Event video (2–3 min.), Sizzle video, Hall of Fame video, Seminar video (full length), and 3 days of photography
Tags: Event coverage · Documentary · Music & performance · Travel