Nick Cave, front man of The Bad Seeds, sits alone in an abandoned conference room, quietly writing in a notebook. Closing the book, he stands and begins to walk, moving through a series of equally empty spaces: down a wide staircase, through a mural-lined hallway, across an auditorium. Finally, he strides through an oversized doorway and into an expansive theater, where a grand piano is situated in the middle of the otherwise unadorned floor. Taking a seat at the piano bench, he moves his hands to the keys and begins to play.
Photographed by Robbie Ryan, BSC, ISC, Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace streamed to a ticketed online audience as a one-time-only event on Thursday, July 23. The feature-length performance is among a host of projects that have rolled camera since the motion-picture industry began to reemerge from the lockdowns imposed earlier this year in an effort to quell the global spread of COVID-19.
In the U.K. in particular, It has been extremely busy, cinematographer Deepa Keshvala says. I have never shot so much in such a short space of time. Still, the uptick has favored some types of production more than others. Things still feel patchy, cinematographer Nanu Segal notes. Commercials definitely seem to be picking up more than drama.
Alongside commercials, music videos and concert-style performances similar to Idiot Prayer have also experienced a recent boom. Cinematographer James Rhodes' first job out of lockdown was for one of the first streaming concerts, which found singer-songwriter Laura Marling performing alone in London's Union Chapel on June 6. Rhodes describes the venue as a bit in the round, with a stage wrapped in a horseshoe of pews. To not be restricted to filming it as a normal stage performance was really thrilling and let us make the most of the room.
Working with director Giorgio Testi, Rhodes suggested extending the location's existing stage outward and then shooting with the cameras looking toward the pews the reverse of what a typical filmed performance would look like in that space. It's infinitely more interesting to view the room from that perspective, Rhodes says, and also it's a nice wink towards why we're here because the audience can't be.
We had three operated cameras and one static, he explains, and it was all Primo Zooms except the static, which was on a tripod up at the top row with a gorgeous 10mm Primo. The idea for the static was to make it about the room and have an ultra-satisfying shot that we could cut to and hang on for a while. And then we had an 11:1 [24-275mm] Primo Zoom on a 6-foot slider on the deck so it could be as low as possible and make the most of the lighting in the background, and two 19-90mm Primo Zooms, one on a Steadicam and the other handheld. The 19-90mm is my favorite Steadicam zoom; it's the perfect range and it's not too big.
Two sets were captured with Marling, with the first streamed live to viewers in the U.K. and the second recorded to be streamed across the pond some hours later. During the first performance, dusk light was still visible outside Union Chapel's windows, but by the second set, night had fallen. Because we were in a church, I really wanted to use tungsten and to mix it with daylight, Rhodes says. My approach was to mix tungsten and [natural] daylight for the first set, and then mix tungsten with some daylight color-temperature fixtures for the second set.
The production's lighting package was primarily sourced through Panalux. We had a big festoon with lots of 25-watt tungsten bulbs on the upper balcony, and then I had a 2.5K HMI follow spot to put a shaft of light in the haze, the cinematographer explains. As a sort of key light, we used a 5K Molebeam, and then it was about adding structural highlights in the background. We had three 2K Molebeams on the ground level, dimmed for a warm tungsten glow, and then loads of 650s that we used to uplight the archways in the ground-floor architecture. We also had a few Sunstrips on either side of the 12-by-12 deck that we built above the pews, where Laura spends most of her time performing, that we could modulate depending on the shot. The lighting was all back to a desk, so we were tweaking constantly.
Panalux also provided most of the lighting package for Idiot Prayer, Ryan's first job since late February, when he had shot pickups for a feature. Nick is friends with the director John Hillcoat, who was in Australia, and John sent references to Nick about different styles of lighting, Ryan says. One of the things Nick really liked was a still from the first version of Suspiria, a picture of the actress lit with a pastel green against a pastel pink. So the idea was that there'd be one color on him and a contrasting color on the architecture.
From one song to the next, the cinematographer adds, those color schemes would change. I got lucky that he had all his notes in front of him on the piano, so one of our lights was able to bounce off of that, and that lit him up really nicely. We also had a couple of big doorways in the background, and I put a big 5K Molebeam though each of those. And then he let me do one thing which I really wanted to try, for the track Man on the Moon.' I'm a big fan of the Henri-Georges Clouzot film Inferno, where Romy Schneider's got a light revolving around her it's hypnotic. So I did a chase going around him with a 15-foot square of Astera tubes that we built with gaffer Andy Cole. It feels a bit like Nick's in space while he's singing.
Nick sent the playlist a week before, Ryan continues, so I knew the songs, but I didn't know what order they would be in which meant [the shoot] was very loose and had an energy that, if it had been much more rehearsed, probably wouldn't have been
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Nick Cave, front man of The Bad Seeds, sits alone in an abandoned conference room, quietly writing in a notebook. Closing the book, he stands and begins to walk, moving through a series of equally empty spaces: down a wide staircase, through a mural-lined hallway, across an auditorium. Finally, he strides through an oversized doorway and into an expansive theater, where a grand piano is situated in the middle of the otherwise unadorned floor. Taking a seat at the piano bench, he moves his hands to the keys and begins to play.
