The Choir Room

May 2022, a studio on Nashville's Music Row. Music stands, a piano, an organ, and a stack of black folders with printed lyrics inside. The founder came to us to have the first one filmed, which meant committing a crew to something that had no audience yet, no name anyone recognised, and no second attempt if the night went sideways. It also could not be covered like a concert, because there was no stage and no audience in the room at all. The people who showed up were the choir. That is the entire point, and the exact reason a long lens at the back of the house would have come away with nothing.

We covered it like a live broadcast rather than a video shoot, with operators working inside the room instead of behind it, so the frame sits within the circle rather than looking in at it. Positions were assigned around the music, the organ, the percussion, whoever was leading, and above all the faces, so the edit always had a reaction to cut to. We came back for several of the early gatherings and cut a body of work out of them, shooting to the arrangement rather than to a running time and keeping the edit in-house so the material stayed in one set of hands from the room to the release.