Last month we were involved in the production of the CBS Sunday Morning interview with Sir Paul McCartney regarding the ‘Eyes of the Storm’ exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.
Here’s an extract from the NPG website about it:
“An unprecedented exhibition, revealing – for the first time – extraordinary photographs taken by Paul McCartney.
In this show, we focus on portraits captured by McCartney, using his own camera, between December 1963 and February 1964 – a time when The Beatles were catapulted from a British sensation to a global phenomenon. These never-before-seen images offer a uniquely personal perspective on what it was like to be a ‘Beatle’ at the start of ‘Beatlemania’ – and adjusting from playing gigs on UK stages, to performing to 73 million Americans on The Ed Sullivan Show. At a time when so many camera lenses were on the band, Paul McCartney’s photographs offer a crucial new perspective on the story of a band creating cultural history – in one of its most exciting chapters.”
In the interview with Anthony Mason for CBS Sunday Morning, which was filmed before it was open to the public, Sir Paul talks about the recently uncovered photographs and his experiences during The Beatles’ first tour in America.
Watch the interview here:
Setting up this interview was quite challenging; Sir Paul was scheduled to do three different interviews back-to-back with three different networks (two for television and one for radio), and they all had to be completed in a relatively short space of time.
The collaborative approach between the two television networks lead to certain necessary compromises but overall the shoot went very well. By using the same positions and lighting, once the first interview was done, the next team only had to replace the cameras, thus saving time and effort.
For the personal over-the-shoulder shots, we used three Sony FX6 cameras mounted on Sachtler 20P and 18p tripods, with a combination of 50mm and 85mm G Master lenses.
Additionally, there was a short tracking sequence that followed Sir Paul and Anthony as they walked along the corridors of the exhibition and talked about some of the photographs. For this, we used a Sony FX3 + 50mm lens mounted on a DJI Ronin S gimbal, and a flat LED light mounted on a small stand that was fashioned into a handle bar.
A week after the shoot, Hungry Eye came back to the NPG in central London to film B-roll that would be necessary to complete the piece. This time though, the preparations were closer to the opening day and the gallery looked completely different.