Credits:
Production Company: Remedy
Director/DP: Josh Sliffe
1st AC: Allen Baker

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Audio Recording & Mixing: Drop of Sun
Edit & Color: Josh Sliffe
Asheville Masonic Temple in Asheville, NC

For this one, we were filming a performance by Angel Olsen for the Tonight Show at the Masonic Temple in Asheville, NC. We didn’t have time to go see the space beforehand or budget to bring along crew like a gaffer or grip, and we also didn’t have time on the day to spend setting something elaborate up since we had little time in the venue, so whatever the plan would be, it had to be lean and able to be setup quickly with two guys. There were also some other known unknowns like which direction we would be facing, crowd or stage. So there was some pressure for it to be lit 360.

I stumbled on the fact that the venue had an online virtual tour done through matterport, that I was actually able to take some measurements from. Come to find out the distance between the balcony rails was 30’. Knowing this, I went with using overhead steel cable with carabiners and tensioners built in, so I could basically walk in and clip the pre-made cable to both sides and quickly have overhead support for lights.

From there, I carabinered two 1k China balls in the center from below, with the only other additions being two Lowell DP 1k’s with full CTB put in the back corners for color contrast and hair light/separation. Lights were set.

For camera, the doorway dolly I brought wouldn’t work with the floors being so squeaky and I wanted to do too much movement to just easyrig around with the Angenieux 16-40 I brought, so we last minute threw the black magic pocketcam with a sigma lens on the ronin-s we’d thrown in a box “just in case” and once she was set, we ran our first and only real take. One take.

It turned out better than I’d hoped for. It was a bit bumpy here and there but the part I loved was that the movement and positioning of camera lined up well with her song’s pacing. Especially for only having heard it a few times the day or two before, it was a hard song to map mentally so I was really just watching runtime to get a sense of where in the song we were and trying to move camera to the next logical position given what I was hearing. And it lined up great!

This project sticks out in my mind because it was just two guys with a few boxes of gear and a lot of unknowns driving down in a Camry to make something happen. And I’m happy with what we got, since we had about as much time as it took you to read this.