Director's Intent

Several months before the November concerts, Disney+ approached the Rocket/Elton camp about the possibility of celebrating Elton’s historic final performance on Sunday, November 20, by live streaming it, the first such live broadcast on the streamer. “They wanted it to be great, and we wanted it to be really great,” says Woodroffe.

He, Furnish and Pattinson then met to discuss possible additions to the show to make it even more special, at Furnish’s suggestion—perhaps fireworks, LED wristbands and more. Fulwell 73 Productions, known for their expertise with large music event broadcasts (and others) was engaged to produce the show, with Ben Winston acting as executive producer and Sally Wood as showrunner. They, in turn, engaged award-winning director Paul Dugdale to helm the project, both for the livestreamed edit, which was available following, on demand, from that date until January 27, and an edit and remix, crafted from all three nights’ shows, which arrived on that date.

“One is always aware of the changes that are needed to bring a live show to the small screen,” says Woodroffe, “But as soon as David told me who would be directing, I knew we would be fine. Paul is the very best at understanding that filming a rock concert is not simply about pointing cameras or constantly having cranes sweeping across the audience and having the audience lit up like it’s daylight. It’s about telling a story. He captured the interaction between Elton and the audience and made it the heart of the show. He found the drama and avoided the cliches”

Adds Furnish, “Paul is a maestro. He’s an absolute genius at what he does. His instincts for live concert programming and razor sharp timing are just extraordinary.”

With countless, unique shows under his belt for such artists as Paul McCartney, Coldplay, Adele, Sam Smith, Ed Sheeran and many others—including a smaller Elton John show in 2016—Dugdale began by asking himself one important question: “How can you film this person behind a piano, in a dynamic way, that no one’s thought of doing before?” he recalls. “That was my starting point. And it becomes a tricky balance. It’s Elton’s show, so, obviously, it’s all about him. But there’s the grandeur of the moment, the fact of it being a landmark show, an historic chapter in his career, is a very important thing. And the ‘room’—Dodger Stadium—plays such an important part, and is also a character in the piece. As is Elton’s relationship with the audience, which is so key, both to him and to them.”

He indeed avoids the usual cliches, as Woodroffe noted. “My biggest bug bear, of watching music on screen, is feeling like everything is the same—‘This verse is exactly the same as the chorus. But, musically, it’s totally different.’ Why wouldn’t you show that in pictures, as well? We just always make sure we’re being guided by the music and the artist.”

To begin his prep, the director first had to familiarize himself with the show, which came in the form of a visit to a concert in Santa Clara, CA in early October, as well as studying one which had been videotaped, in both cases, taking extensive notes. “I just learned the show, inside out, and understood when the musicians are playing what, who does what, and when they’re moving around the stage—how it all works, the mechanics of it,” he states. There were also several scouting trips to Dodger Stadium, to get a sense of the space. Then, he says, “I know the show, what it looks like. So then it’s a matter of, ‘Okay, what is the best possible way of presenting this show,’ given we have two-and-a-bit nights to shoot it.” The whole team would indeed shoot Saturday and Sunday (“show day”), with Saturday almost as a “dress rehearsal,” and with a very limited shoot at Thursday’s show (see below).

From seeing the show, Dugdale begins to have a sense of the roles each song plays in the set. “For instance, ‘Benny and The Jets,’ the opener—it’s about Elton. So ‘Let’s see Elton. Let’s see who we’ve come to watch.’ And it’s followed by ‘Philadelphia Freedom.’ For me, that was ‘Let’s introduce the band now. It’s a big band number, everyone’s playing their hearts out. It’s loads of energy. Let’s see the band members.’ So I try to give each track an identity, a purpose.”

Some songs have more creative content, such as lighting or video material. “As we go through the set, there might be a song like ‘Have Mercy on The Criminal,’ where we’d want to show a lot of the material that’s on the screens, because the imagery is so strong. It really suited the whole production. So we might say, ‘Okay, this one, we’ll show very square, frontal wide shots,’ so you take in the whole thing. It’s a very broad brushstroke approach.”

He will also sit with the Creative Directors (Furnish, Woodroffe), going through each song, and asking, “’Okay, what were you thinking when you were designing for this song? What role do you feel it plays? What does Elton like about this? What’s the most important part of this track?’ Because that helps me to understand the show, intrinsically, from their intentions and how they made it. Because I want to interpret their vision on the screen.

The next step is for Dugdale to literally map out, on a scale drawing of Dodger Stadium, where he envisions cameras needed to do the job. “The camera plot is the road map to everything,” he notes. “And the camera positioning is vital. It took a good team of people, and a lot of head scratching, in order to make this work.”

As would be for any director, the director of photography (or “DP,” as they are often known)—the cinematographer—is a key partner for planning any shoot of any kind. In this case, he turned to fellow Briton, Brett Turnbull, who has shot a good many of Dugdale’s projects over the past 10 years. “We just finished Coldplay in Buenos Aires, and before that, we were doing Harry Styles in New York and Sam Smith at The Albert Hall in London and two other unannounced projects. And that’s just in the last few months,” he notes.

Though Turnbull drafted the complete plan and preparation with Dugdale, due to his own schedule, he was not able to be on site the day of the Dodger Stadium shoot. So he turned to a trusted colleague, cinematographer James Rhodes. “We were both concerned, when I was unavailable for the actual shoot. But we managed to get such a great team together, and come up with a plan. I would do the initial prep with Dugdale—we’ve worked together for such a long time, so he trusts me to get everything on the right track. Then, I could just do a handoff to James. And I knew we were in extremely capable hands.”

The two had met socially seven or eight years ago, and, as Rhodes says, “He was one of my heroes, when I was cutting my teeth, watching stuff and going, ‘Who is this Brett guy? He seems to be doing all the cool jobs!’” A few years later, I find myself on the same agency roster as him and bumping into him at social events and at rental houses. He’s the nicest man you’[ll mee, so we quickly became friends.” At some point, he got a call from Turnbull, saying, “Do you want to come and do an extra camera on this interesting project?”—which turned out to be Paul McCartney doing a show at the legendary Abbey Road Studio 2 in London. From then on, the two would operate cameras for each other, when the opportunity arose. “Brett even came and operated B-Cam for me one time! Which was very humbling.” And, in 2020, when Turnbull was unavailable for a Dugdale job—Sam Smith Live at Abbey Road—he recommended Rhodes. “I got along great with Paul, and, since then, if Brett is not around, I’m in the mix. I think I’ve gotten to do 10 jobs with Paul now.”

As part of his prep with Dugdale, which began in October, Turnbull made sure he too saw one of the tour’s shows—in this case, the concert in San Diego on November 9, 10 days before Dodger Stadium. “Paul had seen the show before that,” he notes, “but we were both just too busy to be in the same place at the same time. I was actually on my way back from another shoot in San Francisco, so luckily I could make it there for one day.” He made sure to bring a camera, to shoot some test footage, “So we could see how the lighting and video screens looked on camera, how people looked on stage, and what work needed to be done before filming the show. He was accompanied by broadcast Lighting Designer Noah Mitz.

“I had the camera plot by then, so it was a good chance to meet up with the tour guys, including John Steer. This was a very important meeting, especially to learn more about the role of the IMAG cameras. The last thing any of us would want would be to mess up his show. But, at the same time, we were going to be looking for some of the same angles. It’s a delicate negotiation! Luckily, John’s a terrific, generous man.”

Television is indeed often fighting for similar positions as IMAG at such shows—to get that perfect shot of Elton. “So we have to collaborate on where our cameras go, where theirs go, and whether we’re getting in each other’s way,” Rhodes explains, though, as Dugdale notes, “Theirs is an entirely different discipline. He’s only concerned, really, in showing close shots. He doesn’t need to show geography of relationship quite as much. But John would help us with which real estate is free, where is a dangerous place where there’s a thoroughfare, but would say, ‘But here, would work.’ He was so generous with his knowledge to us. And that’s not always the case with filming rock shows. Sometimes the touring team can be very territorial, and actively make it worse for you. But they were certainly not like that, everyone was here to make it a great experience.”

And while it might seem obvious that “a camera is a camera,” the two disciplines really couldn’t share each other’s camera feeds. “It really comes down to a matter of camera frame rates,” Camera Supervisor Bobby del Russo explains. “We’re shooting, using cine cameras, with a frame rate of 23.98 (24 fps) frames per second, and they’re shooting at 30 fps, a difference of six frames,” not to mention the huge difference in resolution, making the IMAG cameras’ images unusable for television.

For IMAG to use the cine cameras’ images, “That difference has to be corrected,” explains Turnbull. “The live video screens are normally a little out of sync to begin with, because there’s a ton of video processing going on. If we send pictures from our cameras, with a frame rate conversion added into the mix, that adds even more delay—and the live video screens can get horribly out of sync. So that’s not really favored by the tour video folks. They generally prefer just a clean signal of their own.”

Not to say that there weren’t exceptions. “They took four or five of ours each night, because there were new angles we had which were useful to them,” reveals Dugdale. “For example, when we had the Agito on Night 1 (see below), shooting the Elton portrait, we removed the camera they normally had attached to the piano. So in order for them to still get the similar shots, we gave them the feed from our camera.” Such offerings sometimes happened as a bartering chip. “We would offer some of ours as a contingency, if we were really getting in their way,” Rhodes explains. “”We want to do this, but we know it will be hard for you. If we do that, you can have the feed from it, if you’d like.’”

And, on occasion, television would do a handoff to IMAG, for instance, a nice closeup of Elton from one of Dugdale’s FOH cameras, which then appears on a wider camera shot—showing the crowd and that very same image up on the IMAG screen. “Those kinds of shots are actually fairly common,” says del Russo. “It gives a little life to the wide shot, in a cool way.”

While on his scout in San Diego, Turnbull also took the time to walk the stage with production manager Peter McFee. “We needed to figure out stuff like, ‘If we put a camera here, how the hell does the bass player get out?’ ‘Is the instrument technician going to trip over the camera?’ All kinds of nuts and bolts discussion. You really need to up there, in amongst all the hardware, to find out if, physically, ‘The stuff we’ve imagined, does it actually work?’”

Turnbull has great respect for his director friend’s understanding of cameras—and how to use them. “He’s a very savvy director, he knows what he wants.” After Dugdale has done his own camera plot, Turnbull will bring it to the next step, getting engineering drawings from the venue, when available—and at Dodger Stadium, they were—and importing them into a CAD program, to begin working on a true scale drawing. “I can then plot the cameras Paul’s marked out on his drawing and check things more accurately,” the DP explains. “Like, ‘Okay, but can you actually fit a 50 ft. Technocrane in that space? Are we crossing a fire lane?’ Or ‘How far away is that camera? That’s 500 ft. away—no lens has ever been invented that can get this shot from here.’” He will sit with Dugdale and go through each camera position the director wants and find out what’s needed and why. “I’ll ask him, ‘What is your intention here? What is the role of this camera? What shots do you need out of it?’ I need to understand why he’s put each there, and what he’s thinking. That way, if something isn’t going to work for some technical reason, I can offer up another way of getting the shot. I might also suggest other angles that might be useful. With Dugdale, I’d usually get the reply, ‘I already thought of that, but I don’t want it’. Because he does his homework!”

Then, he says, “It’s my job to translate each of these camera positions into a very precise equipment order. And also work out how to fit our hardware around everything else that’s already part of the show.” For instance, he can draw in dolly track and other pieces of camera and grip equipment, to scale, in the right size and shape, on platforms at the correct height. “I’ll try and draw everything as accurately as I can, so that we can then go back to the tour production and the promoter and say, ‘This is what we want to do.’”

And that is critical, because of the issue of seat losses. Placing a camera setup where Dugdale wants, to capture the precise shot he’s looking for, might mean either setting up a platform within a seating area or blocking the view of fans seated behind it. “We need to figure out how many seats they need to kill—which translates to how many ticket sales does the promoter lose? Putting a camera in one spot could mean the loss of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. So we need to give the promoter a solid plan. We can’t just turn up on the day and start throwing equipment down. Because the chances are, we’ll be told to move it. And then we’re in trouble.”

It then can become a matter of bartering. “We can trade. We can say, ‘Well, all right, we can’t put that there, because there’s too much impact on ticket sales. So what can we do?’ Or ‘How about if we cut this camera and give you those seats back, so we can have that one, because it’s more important to us?’”

Next, in order to begin to get an idea of lenses and camera equipment, such as platforms or dollies, Turnbull likes to work within a 3D model of the stadium and stage—drawing, again, from engineering data from both the stadium and the tour/Stufish, plotting virtual cameras into it. Using Vectorworks, a 3D design program, to build a previsualization (“previz”), he can look at every single shot with Dugdale. “We usually run through lens choices this way. I can show him how wide or tight a particular zoom lens can get, and what’s in the back of frame. That can be looking at mannequins of the band on stage, with the lighting rig overhead. We can put cameras anywhere in the venue, set them at different heights, then move them around, to see what our shots might actually look like.”

One camera position, for instance, was designed by Dugdale, specifically, to capture Elton’s reflection in the top of the piano. “The camera is 200 or 250 feet away. We have to determine precisely at what angle that camera has to be aimed at the piano, and where it is placed. Then, I could show that to Dugdale and say, ‘It’s in these seats, here.’ And they knew, then, which tickets to hold. But without the previz, we would have only discovered that when the camera was built, on the day.”

The other key player for translating the desired shots into actual equipment was the Camera Supervisor, Bobby del Russo. It is his job to suggest pieces of gear, or perhaps make suggestions about camera locations—and, also incredibly important, staff the camera team with skilled, experienced camera operators.

“It’s an interesting thing,” Dugdale informs, “the role of Camera Supervisor doesn’t really exist in the U.S. In the States, the DP would probably do the kit list for all the cameras. But, on the ground, it’s really important to have a Camera Supervisor, who not only already knows about all the items in the kit, but has a complete overview of everything. Bobby was really vital in our positioning, getting camera platforms built and at the right height. In the States, more technical people tend to do those things. But I need someone who has more creative input—someone who knows, ‘What is most important to a camera operator?’ We benefit from knowing a camera person, an operator’s expertise, about ‘What height that should be at, how close should it be?’ He’s really invaluable.”

“The great thing about Paul,” del Russo says, “is that if he says why he doesn’t want to do something I suggest—which he often does—it gives me a better sense of what he’s really wanting to get. If I don’t understand what he’s got in his head, then I can’t really help him. But he’s good about that.”