James - Tomorrrow
This was a gas to work on. We were in a long process studio at Bow in East London and shot it all in a day!
The motion-control camera was mounted on an overhead track and whizzed along at 25mph. It took 2 seconds to get up to speed, so we only had 3 seconds of material from each take! I had a U-Matic edit suite on set with me and was cutting as we went. Kevin Godley (such a lovely guy) was directing and told me to just do what I wanted. Towards the end of the day I had a wicked edit (with one clever moment I was very proud of where it looked as if a woman's head exploded into confetti!). The edit ran for two minutes. Kevin was amused, but asked:
"What about the rest of the song?"
"That's it, no more material." He frowned briefly then shot the stuff you see at the beginning.
James himself was a real sweetie. I love his demented marionette dance. He'd only just cut all his hair off (to this day I have no idea what he looks like otherwise) and was feeling self-conscious. But Kevin told him he looked ok and that seemed to make him happy.
It was all lit by the very capable Dan Landin with one huge carbon arc 'brute' being sparked on and off. The white light is the spark on, and the orange is the afterglow of the hot carbons.
No other lights. I would never have dared to do that: pure 'one light cinematography'!
Dunno what that rough looking woman with all the make-up was all about though...