Imagine Symphony Live

Winner Audience Award BEST NARRATIVE SHORT Bendfilm Festival 2020. 

Winner OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SCORE (Short Film – Live Action)Hollywood Music In Media Awards 2020.

Winner BEST ART MUSIC VIDEO International Music Video Awards 2020.

Winner BEST INSTRUMENTAL COMPOSITION Palm Beach International Music Awards 2020

A young boy’s journey of imagination inspired by his first time watching a live symphony. 

This short film is part of a multi-media interactive web experience designed to inspire and educate about symphonic music and the joy of community orchestra. See more at imaginesymphony.live

Co-Director/Cinematographer
Bradley Lanphear

Director/Producer
Evan Sigvaldsen

Composer
Chris Thomas

Music Director
Michael Gesme

Editor/Colorist
Bradley Lanphear

Production Technicians
Dustin Woods & Annika Johanssen

In Partnership with
Central Oregon Symphony

Most music videos are filmed for music that has already been written and recorded, and most film scores are written for films that have already been filmed and edited. Imagine Symphony Live was a unique hybrid of those two creative approaches. The goal of this breakdown is to present our approach to creating this award winning visual narrative, and solving the many challenges faced along the way. 

Table of Contents

1 Concept/Script

2 Visual Language

2.1 The Concert Hall

2.2 Outdoor Adventures

2.3 City Bus and Cafe

2 Challenges & Solutions

3.1 Challenge 1 – Bus Scene

3.2 Challenge 2 – Forest Scene

3.3 Challenge 3 – Filming the Concert Hall with a live audience

4 Gear

The idea for Imagine Symphony Live was conceived during a casual conversation between Producer Evan Sigvaldsen and I. It started out with the simple statement, “I want to shoot a music video. I’ve never done one.” Evan suggested I should shoot something with the local symphony. I didn’t know there was a local symphony or that Evan was also a cellist in the orchestra. I had zero experience working with orchestras so the first thing I did was arrange to film a scheduled rehearsal just to get an idea of what to expect and hopefully get some ideas. The footage I shot that night became extremely useful to the whole creative process and informing both the formation of the story itself and how we approached the visual narrative.

The story of Imagine Symphony Live unfolds entirely without spoken dialogue. Technically speaking, there was no “script” in the usual sense. We knew that the main character would be a child experiencing a live orchestra for the first time and we used that notion of a child-like day dream be the guide for creating the story. During the initial creative team meeting, composer Chris Thomas brought in a conceptual piece of music that contained what would become the main musical theme and melody which he had synthesized on a computer. As we all sat around the table listening, we started brainstorming ideas of what could be done to tell a visual story narrated by the music.  After that, Producer Evan Sigvaldsen created a rough visual timeline giving us an overview of the story and arc. The specifics continued to evolve, but the graphic below is the starting structure we used to form our creative process. 

Our next step was to create an animatic which would serve to form the beginning of a cinematic style. We scouted a location and did some filming with no shot list or direction. We simply brought two musicians, a loudspeaker which they could hear the concept music on and play along to, and my son as a talent stand-in. There was no shot list, our goal was pure creative experimentation. We spent a few hours just shooting whatever looked cool and felt good. The location we used here ended up being one of the actual locations used in the real film.

We took this concept short, and presented it to the members of the orchestra. Up until then, no one except music director, Michael Gesme was aware of what we were up to. The idea we proposed combined with the concept short was received with great enthusiasm by the members of the orchestra and we started collecting sign ups of those who wanted to be involved.

Over the next several months, we went through several more iterations of the music and storyboards until we had enough of a plan to start scheduling shoot days.

The visual elements of Imagine Symphony Live were crafted around three primary environmental ideas – the Concert Hall, the Outdoor Adventures, and the City Bus/Cafe.

The Concert Hall

The first environment is the child experiencing reality inside the concert hall. These scenes were filmed primarily at eye-level with a 35mm spherical lens to maintain a grounded sense of reality. The exceptions being a few scenes which were filmed using a combination of large jib movements and a tilt/shift lens which created a very strong sense of “altered-ness”. In the shot where the music is first starting, we see the camera perform a large jib-down movement combined with a 24mm tilt shift lens. The tilt shift changes the angle of the focal plane which in this case allowed us to visually isolate the boy from the people seated around him. The jib movement communicates to the viewer that we are entering the child’s thoughts and imagination. 

Outdoor Adventures

the second environment is a series of imaginary outdoor adventures where the child’s journey of adventure is “narrated” by the music he’s hearing, but there is no actual interaction with the musicians. The presence of the musicians in the outdoor scenes is intended to be interpreted as imaginary, not literal. In order to maintain the sense of these being experientially different from the concert hall, we filmed all of the outdoor scenes using anamorphic lenses. Anamorphic lenses are a common cinematic optical choice because they stretch the image horizontally, but not vertically. This creates a  number of effects on the optically captured image. The widescreen aspect puts the viewer into a different perception of what’s happening. The lenses are also “softer”. That loss of sharpness adds to the perceived notion that these scenes are not real, but imagined. Further, when stacked with neutral density filters for exposure control, the lenses also create lots of unusual flaring when aimed directly at light source, such as the sun. While these characteristics are technically flaws, we chose to lean in to those flaws and allow them to create an optically imperfect, but very whimsical look which we felt contributed to the sense of these scenes being imagined instead of real. 

City Bus and Cafe

The third environment is the city bus and cafe scene which is intended to blur the line between imagination and reality. This is the only sequence outside of the concert hall where the child acknowledges the presence of real people but he sees them “transform” into musicians.

These are the only scenes in the film which were captured with non-stabilized, handheld camera work. The shaky movements convey a sense of reality, while the things which the child is experiencing are fantastical. This creates a visual tight rope walk between reality and imagination. 

The bus scene is filmed to appear to be a “oner” (one-shot take) using “whip pans” or (fast camera pans) and using that motion to hide the cut between shots. In this scene, the boy gets on the bus and sees other passengers riding as well. The camera does a quick 180° pan and we see those same passengers transform into a string quartet. At the end of the music segment, the camera does another whip pan away from the musicians, back to the child, then pulls back revealing the people once again as normal passengers. 

The scene then fades to the city cafe. It begins with another simulated “oner” shot where the boy and mother are walking by on the sidewalk and enter the cafe. The camera follows them on the sidewalk past the front of the building and then “magically” transitions “through” the window and continues the shot inside the cafe. This was accomplished though careful camera movement and post editing. The sidewalk shot technically ends just as the camera gets close to the window. The shot is then continued from inside the window by matching the ending and starting frames and then seamlessly blending the motion together in the edit. 

What happens inside the cafe again uses the tilt/shift technique and progressively intensified lighting to blur the line between what’s real and imagined. We see the mother walk out of focus and the boy notices a woman sitting at a table who comes into focus in the same area of the frame where the mother went out of focus.

In the reverse shot, the boy stays positioned in focus in frame right, while the camera does a slight pan where the cafe woman moves out of focus and two musicians come into focus from frame left.

In the next shot we see the first cafe woman is now transformed into the harpist who we have already seen in other scenes and she is suddenly accompanied by other musicians.

The musician group then magically expands again and the lighting gets more dramatic and hazy. The camera does a slight roll (adding even more surrealism) and pull out to briefly reveal the orchestra conductor just as the music reaches the dramatic crescendo sequence. The intimate close ups combined with the strong sense of altered-ness of this scene intentionally leaves the audience to decide for themselves how they interpret what is real, and what is imagined.

Imagine Symphony Live was a complex project. There were technical and logistical challenges to be solved every step of the way. It would simply take too long to share the story of every challenge and solution, so here we will just share some of the more interesting instances where our team found creative solutions to these challenges. 

Challenge 1 – Bus Scene

This was the very first scene we filmed and it was originally intended to be filmed using the gimbal stabilizer. However, once we actually got on the bus to start filming, we discovered that the aisle was too narrow to be practical for moving the large gimbal rig. Due to the narrow space, we had to shoot it handheld. At the time we thought that it would become an inconsistency in the visual language which we would just be forced to live with, but we decided lean into the handheld style for the following cafe scene and make it part of the visual language. In the end we felt that it was exactly what those scenes needed to maintain that tension between reality and imagination. The challenge forced us to improvise and the result became a happy accident that actually changed the whole course for that segment of the film. 

Challenge 2 – Forest Scene

This is the shortest scene of the film but it was one of the most physically difficult to film due to the “nature” of the scene. While it’s not a highly technical scene in that there are no camera tricks being used, the challenge came from the combination of blocking, working in the natural forest environment with its inherent obstacles and capturing the this oner shot within the timing required to fit the musical segment.

The scene is timed so that each musician enters the frame at the precise moment when that instrument is heard in the music. In and of itself, that is not a hard concept, but it becomes difficult when compounded with the movement of the child, positioning each musician in time and space, and the camera moving backwards through the forest and having to navigate logs, tree roots, holes and other such natural elements.

The technical aspects of the shot starts with a close up profile framing of the child, followed by a quick partial orbit, pull out and focus rack, and then reverse tracking the subject. In order to accomplish the reverse tracking, we had an assistant spotting my movements and calling out the obstacles as I approached them.

The solution to the difficulty was simply practice, practice, practice. It’s only a 16 second scene, but the process of rehearsing and repositioning and refining the movements took about 4 hours to get it all to come together right.

Here is the unedited footage of the scene with the in-camera audio to demonstrate the timing and direction of the final scene.

Note: It is sad to mention, that this location where we filmed in 2019 was destroyed by the devastating 2020 Oregon wildfires.

Challenge 3 – Filming the Concert Hall with a live audience

The concert hall scenes were filmed across 3 nights of live performances of the Central Oregon Symphony in February of 2020. A few things happened which resulted in major changes to the production. 

First of all there was one shot which was part of the original plan which involved the use of a cable cam. The shot was supposed to be a fast fly-over which would have basically looked like an indoor drone shot flying over the audience towards the orchestra on stage. It was supposed to be the first transition from the concert hall to the lake scene. We attempted to accomplish this using a Wiral which is a very small wireless controlled motorized cable cam system. The problem we found was that the 100 foot distance of the cable combined with such a small camera set up made the motion much too jittery. There was just too much vibration which over such a long distance made the shot unusable. Since there were only 3 nights of performances and we needed the concert hall to be full of people, we only had 3 chances to make the shot work. The proper solution would have been a much bigger heavier camera set up which would have reduced the amount of vibration, but it simply wasn’t feasible within the budget constraints. After the second attempt we concluded that it just wasn’t going to work and we had to come up with a new shot idea to replace the cable cam.

Then something completely unexpected happened. 

On the second night of filming, after the performance was over, we were setting up to film the exit scene of the boy and mother leaving the auditorium. Moments before we were ready to roll camera, there was a fire at the venue. A wind storm had knocked down a power pole which caused a surge and the power transformer outside exploded in a giant ball of fire. We had to quickly break down the set and evacuate.

We expected that we would be able to just go back and finish filming once the building was repaired. In the meantime, the 3rd night orchestra performance was moved to another venue. On this final night we had to improvise everything because of the location change. Our remaining shot list consisted of 1) a new shot to transition between the auditorium and lake scene, 2) audience applause at the end of the show and 3) boy and mother exiting. 

When we arrived at the new venue, we found good and bad news. The good news was that the stage was nearly identical in appearance as the first venue so it was no problem for consistency. The bad news was that the audience seating was completely different and there was no way to match what we had already filmed in the other venue. Further, there was no option to reshoot those scenes because we were working under the constraints of a live performance. 

Solutions: 

The new venue had a catwalk above the stage for accessing the house lighting array. I went up in the catwalk with the camera handheld and just filmed a bunch of variations of shots looking straight down from above the orchestra. At that point in the performance, the orchestra wasn’t even playing the same music so I simply looked for moments which I felt the musicians movements could be believable as being the same music for ISL. It was a hail mary shot which worked. Later we felt that it was probably better than the original idea anyway. The overhead composition turned out to be really nice and with the handheld roll movement that I used, it accomplished exactly what we needed for the scene transition. 

For the audience applause at the end of the show, we were only able to film the stage itself. We couldn’t show the audience because it was just too different in color and style and would have been a major continuity problem. We simply had to re-use footage from the first venue filmed during the show opening. However the orchestra standing on stage in the new venue worked out perfectly. 

After that, we were left with only the boy and mother exit shot that we still needed. We expected to go back to original venue within a few weeks.

Then something else unexpected happened. 

The entire world went into lockdown due to Covid-19. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months and we were still unable to go back to the venue to finish the last remaining shot. After several months we decided to start looking for a new location to film the exit scene. We had to find a hall that matched the look of the first one. It took a long time of searching, but we finally found a suitable location. 

Then something else unexpected happened. 

Kids grow and change fast. With our 9 yr old talent, 8 months of waiting changed his appearance significantly. More than we felt would  be passable to be able to show his face and hair. He just looked… older. Bigger. More hair. He simply didn’t look the same. So we had to re-concept the exit shot. The original shot would have been a head and shoulders shot of the boy and mother walking out, pausing, the mother kneels down to hear the boy say something inaudible, and then he runs back in to meet the conductor. (We had already filmed the conductor shot before the fire happened.) Since the ending shot of the boy going back up the stage starts with a close up on his feet, we decided to embrace that idea for this exit shot. The new location didn’t have a lobby to match the original venue so we couldn’t show what was on either end of the hall. We simply used a dark colored wall as a neutral background and used a sideways trucking shot of their feet walking, pausing, mom kneeling down, and then the boy turning back. We carefully lit the scene to mimic the practical lighting that would have been present at the original venue. Ultimately we think the shot works quite well. It’s not what we wanted, but it works, and considering that the applause shot, the exit shot, and the ending stage shot were separated from each other by nearly 8 months of Covid lockdown and 3 different locations, we feel really good about how the film ending finally came together. 

Even though the story of Imagine Symphony Live takes place in many different locations, the idea is that the boy is experiencing all of this happening in real time as he’s sitting in the audience and watching the performance. Therefore, all of the scenes showing musicians had to be filmed in real time with the music. Knowing that many of our actual audience who will watch this finished film would be keenly aware of what the musicians on screen were doing in relationship to the music, it had to look real. 

To do this, composer Chris Thomas created a version of the music called a “Click Track” which contains a continuous metronome click for the whole duration of music. We then played that click track live on a loud speaker during filming so that the musicians being filmed would always be playing in the exact right timing and tempo. Rather than shoot a take of the full music every time, our sound team cut the music into pieces for the exact scenes and shots. Working with shorter pieces of music allowed us to be able to shoot more takes in less time than if we tried to shoot the full length music every time. 

After each day of filming, we would immediately download the footage and assemble the dailies in the timeline with the full length music. Then we would know exactly what frame and beat of music the next days shoot would start with. 

Imagine Symphony Live was filmed entirely on Sony Alpha7 series mirrorless cameras with rented lenses and accessories from Borrowlenses.com

Camera 1: Sony A7rIII. Camera 2: Sony A7III, Camera 3, Sony A7sII

Lenses: Sigma 18-35mm cine zoom, Sigma 50-100mm cine zoom, Letus35 1.33x anamorphic adapter, Canon 50mm Tilt/Shift, Canon 24mm Tilt/Shift, Sigma 35mm Art prime. Schneider ND Filters.

Lens control: Tilta Nucleus wireless follow focus system.

Recording: Atomos Ninja Flame 4k Monitor/recorder.

Stabilization & Movement: DJI Ronin, DJI Ronin- M, Kessler Pocket Jib, Easyrig