Had to temporarily take off-line the posts relating to my just-completed series “70 Days Around the World”. (I’ll be able to re-post them starting Friday 5/23, as the episodes air) As replacement, I have some frame grabs from my work on the recent DVD release of Jonathan Demme’s “Man From Plains“:

Jonathan was firm that he didn’t want a lot of bright lights distracting the musicians, because even though he wanted a kind of “concert film in a recording studio” keeping a suitable ambiance to support the musicians’ creativity was the top priority. So I had my gaffer pre-rig soft boxes and kino flos around the room just above the frameline and wherever we could hide them to get a wrapping soft light around the players.

The music was a unique fusion of American roots and middle eastern music, and Gaidi Hinnawi (bottom picture) contributed the most unearthly and moving singing I’ve ever heard. In moments like this I lose awareness of my body, the camera in my hands weighs nothing, and I have the improbable sense of sitting comfortably in a dark room watching a large screen with a perfect sound system and basking in a kind of transcendent ecstasy. They pay me for this?

Posted by rooster / New & Updates