How would you describe your preparation for a film role/project?
People sometimes think that all you need to do in a documentary is turn up with a camera and start shooting! If only! In reality, a huge amount of preparation goes into it before a single frame is shot. In this case, we first had to spend several weeks – if not months – negotiating access to the Chorus.
Once that was secure – and it was touch-and-go for a long time – we went to see the Chorus in their home town and spent several more weeks effectively casting the film: deciding who, of the 25 chorus members, would be our central characters, people audiences could empathize with and care about. Each character had to be distinctively different and offer something unique to the story. We also had to decide on the narrative structure, in this case a series of rehearsals culminating in a big show. We had to think about other events to include along the way – which is where sequences like the jail came in. Then we had to work out which songs would be best for the Chorus to work on – and why. And we had to cast those songs too.
Then there were the actual filming preparations. How many cameras, what to do about sound – especially complicated when there’s so much music which needs to be very well recorded. We were very lucky to have the services of Dan Richardson, the Chorus’s own sound engineer, who did a brilliant job creating a really effective and theatrical sound for us.
Every morning, over the seven weeks of principle photography, I would sit down with my team and work out the order of filming for the day: who to film, what we needed to capture, questions I needed to ask. All the time you’re checking your notes to see how to develop the story, or the characters within the story, so the whole thing keeps moving. Otherwise you can easily find yourself going round in circles, which can cause havoc when you try to put it all together in the cutting room.
One of the toughest scenes we had to prepare was the big show at the Academy Theater. We used five cameras for this, and storyboarded most of the camera moves in a several hours’ long briefing which I gave to the crews. Everybody knew which way to move and what to do. As back-up we had Motorolas so we could communicate with each other all the way through the show. It came in very handy in emergencies – at one critical point, just as Fred Knittle was about to start his incredible version of Fix You, I ran out of tape on my camera, but immediately the other teams rushed in to close the gap by filming what I was supposed to be getting.
The music videos presented their own challenges too. We only had a tiny team but we wanted to make them look really good and polished. There were a few weeks of scouting great locations, persuading people to help us out, and borrowing everything we could get our hands on. The hot air balloon in Golden Years came about only because one of the Chorus members had a son who could pilot one – so that went in the mix too!
