^{Photos by Adriano Martelli}

On 30th July 2020, musician Dermot Kennedy performed a one-off live show ‘Some Summer Night’ at the National History Museum. The ticketed event was broadcast live from the venue via YouTube, and time-zoned to specific regions around the world.

The Coronavirus pandemic has proved challenging for live music, but the creative minds at Kennedy’s management company Tap Music and production company Ceremony London saw an opportunity to produce a unique live event, using the world-renowned Natural History Museum in London as a beautiful backdrop for the performance while it was otherwise closed. The lack of audience meant that production could break away from the constraints of a traditional live-performance to explore new arrangements and filming techniques. Between songs, actor Paul Mescal recited monologues to camera while walking through the deserted walkways around the museum and joined Kennedy in a performance of the song ‘Giants’.

Procam Projects was approached by Ceremony London to facilitate the filming of the performance, which was shot beautifully by DOP Nat Hill and the camera crew using 4 ARRI Amiras and 1 ARRI Alexa Mini, paired with a mixture of cinema zooms, including Angenieux Optimo 15-40, Angenieux Optimo 16-42, Angenieux Optimo 24-290, Canon Cine 17-120, and Hawk 150-450 lenses, to give a cinematic look. Using Ereca 4K Cam Racers all cameras were racked through to a centralised engineering gallery, which was rigged into a separate area of the museum by Procam Projects. Procam Projects’ bespoke lens control system enabled remote iris, zoom, and focus control from the engineering gallery, meaning the cine lenses could be integrated into a traditional OB workflow.

The event was produced by Pete Abbott and Andy Derbyshire, and directed by Liz Clare. The team at Jackshoot supplied and co-ordinated the live-stream to YouTube, which was time-zoned, to make it accessible to fans from all over the world. To ensure the filming went smoothly, Procam Projects supplied a Technical Supervisor, Unit Manager, Guarantee Engineer, RF Engineer, Vision Engineer, Comms Engineer, three Camera Assistants, and a Data Wrangler for the project.

“We were thrilled to be approached by Ceremony London to facilitate the filming of this innovative performance in such a well-known, stunning venue. Though Covid has presented challenges for many industries, it is inspiring to see productions thinking outside of the box to create a new way of delivering content. Multicamera filming requires many bodies to make the production work, and it was great to see everyone on set wearing PPE and socially distancing where possible to get the job done safely,” commented Vicky Holden, Managing Director of Procam Projects.