Live the Dream
My umpteenth collaboration with That Joe Payne was our biggest production yet. Joe’s brief was very simple. He’d written a song for a film that had a Cabaret vibe to it, and wanted the accompanying video to pay homage to Liza Minnelli’s famous chair routine. The song itself was in three parts: 1 Verse, Chorus, Verse. 2: Slow middle section - dreamlike, then building back into 3: final Verse, Chorus finale. Joe also wanted a prologue, setting the scene with an MC introducing Joe to the audience, much like Joel Grey’s MC does in the film. I’d been in awe of Bob Fosse’s film since my teens to the point that the sheer genius of the editing and cinematography is seared into my retinas. I’d even spent an entire semester at university studying the camera moves and cutting techniques. Whilst pretty much every collaboration we’d made to date was, to an extent, mostly improvised on the day of the shoot (i.e. double the amount of editing involved to put it together); this time I’d been given a whole month for pre-production - first time that’s ever happened! Once Joe had choreographed the dance sequences for parts 1, 2 & 3, he invited me to film a rehearsal with his dancers. From there I devised a shot-by-shot storyboard for parts 1 & 3. I took him through it the following week and worked out any technical details we’d need. This was a luxury hitherto I’d never been afforded, and I absolutely relished the opportunity. This left Section 2, the dream sequence, which needed to look different without changing locations. With no budget for a set change or extra lighting, I devised a way we could potentially do it, but ultimately I’d have to wing it on the day. Likewise for the Prologue, Joe had written a script with the illustrious Luke Warm, a cabaret artist we’d worked with during our tenure at Simon Drake’s House of Magic, starring as our MC. I knew how I wanted to cut it, but with no time for rehearsal with Luke Warm, there was going to be a degree of improvisation on the day. I drafted in the photographer Dylan Heathcote to be my assistant DP, who operated a second camera (Sony A7iii) for the Prologue and Sequence 1 & 3.
Joe had drafted in around 30 fans, friends and family to make up the audience in the ‘Nice Boy Club’, two make-up artists, lighting operator and sound recordist, and the outstanding director Tamsyn Payne (no relation) to shore up the finer details of the shoot, which had to be done in one day (with another day later for Prologue backstage ‘inserts’, draw up schedule and keep everything running smoothly. My partner, Mikki, dressed the set with homemade battery-operated LED table lights and table cloths on a virtually zero budget, to amazing effect.
The day of the shoot was a day I’ll never forget, but perhaps I’ll save that for another blog. The editing, which followed the storyboard almost religiously, was swift. The improvised elements of filming the Prologue and Section 2 were met with more divine accidents than I’d encountered before. The only real scupper was the lack of lights we were able to obtain (ISOs on both cameras were cranked up to an uncomfortable 1800 on my Canon, and 2500 on the Sony. The colour matching afterward was a major headache!
Still, it’s among my proudest achievements in the five years of Veritesque. The pre-production, teamwork, and the shooting day camaraderie, not to mention the premier in the Black Prince, where we shot the video, to an invited audience of 100 people, six months later, was utterly magical. When the room went dark, and the video, projected onto a giant screen, commences with “Veritesque Presents…”, a good empathetic friend handed me the largest Jaegerbomb to steady my nerves.
