Spitfire Audio are an assemblage of total audiophiles, dedicated to handing musicians the tools they need to induce eargasms at the drop of a hat. They make your music sound great.
One of the ways in which they spread their ‘good sound gospel’ is through a series of live sessions and interviews with their collection of affiliated artists. Having seen our recent work on Novo Amor’s live sessions, they decided to hand over the reins and let us loose on the next film in the series.
At the time, Josh had just come back from seeing Bon Iver live at Hammersmith Apollo. He came into the office on Monday raving to Lewis about the way in which the performance was lit—inspired by naturally motivated sources. After picking his jaw up off the ground in shock that Josh had started a conversation about lighting with him (it’s a long-running gag that Josh is a documentary filmmaker with little time for such considerations), Lewis had a look at his reference images, and began manufacturing a very ropey Photoshop mockup of how he thought the session’s lighting could work.
What the pair weren’t told at the time was that they would only have three hours to set up and execute the session, as well as shooting the interview. As if that wasn’t stressful enough, they’d decided to shoot the session as a Ronin one-taker.
The chaps assembled the hardest working, most eager crew they could find (under mega-short notice, and in the midst of the worst snowstorm in living memory). Honourable mention goes to the suspectedly (definitely) nocturnal Matt Dunford, who, having flown back from Amsterdam at 4am, came to London with us on three hours sleep and lit this in an hour. Hero.
Despite the venue’s interestingly laissez-faire approach to a safe power supply, and the rapidly approaching cut-off time before the artist was due to perform live, the guys executed the shoot with military precision and earned themselves a cheeky Nandos for their toils.*
*Just so you know, we aren’t paid to endorse Nandos, they just happened to be the only restaurant establishment in central Windsor open after 9pm.
