Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
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A new music video, Black Curtain, by musician Ben Lovett will be screened May 8 at The Isis in West Asheville, according to pr flak Kelly Denson. The video was shot last year at the Masonic Temple in downtown Asheville. A crew of 60 and a cast of 100 took a full day to film the production. The video is directed by Asheville’s Paul Schattel.
Lovett has a knack for making gorgeous videos – some are more like short films – and this promises to be an audio and visual feast. Here’s more from Schattel about the making of Black Curtain:
I met Ben about a year or so ago in a local recording studio, and was immediately impressed; not only was his music excellent, his 12 minute film Ghost of Old Highways was a brilliant example of compelling and gorgeous indie filmmaking, North Carolina-style. In other words, right up my alley. So I let him know if he needed another collaborator, I was willing.
He took me up on it. Recently, we completed shooting on Black Curtain, his next magnum opus. Over the winter, I pitched him an idea — a series of ideas, really — that can kinda be summed up as Edward Gorey meets Eyes Wide Shut. Set in the Edwardian Age (not the 1920′s as it may seem, but the 1910′s — the age of the Titanic), my concept revolved around spiritualism and seances, and elegant people who become more and more depraved the more you look at them. There’s a sickness there, a dark underbelly that contrasts and makes all the elegance come alive. (You can see even one of the images from my pitch here.)
Ben took those initial concepts and ran with them, creating a twisted narrative that’s both heartwarming and sinister at the same time. As we set about creating this production, it became bigger and bigger; soon we had a cast of close to 100 people, with a crew of 60-something folks, mixed with both Asheville veterans like Producer Kelly Denson, Production Designer Shane Meador and Art Director Christi Whitely, and a full crew from Atlanta, led by Director of Photography J. Christopher Campbell.
For our location, we were lucky enough to secure the Masonic Temple here in Asheville — a 100 year old building that, thanks to the Mason’s somewhat secretive nature, had been closed for many decades to outsiders, and was thus preserved as neatly as a time capsule. Gloriously eccentric, with the original furniture and lighting fixtures still in place, the building was perfect for our needs.
The production itself was surreal. Huge and complex, with teams of makeup and wardrobe personnel, the halls of the entire building were busy with costumed extras and technical crew carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars of high tech film equipment up and down the antique stairs. One bleary early morning I found myself approving various young women who were eager to get naked for our camera.
The result will be a gloriously elaborate and eccentric short film that will fit in nicely with the work Ben has previously done.
I’ve been a fan of this guy since his amazing appearance at Music Video Asheville 2009. Hoping he’s represented at this year’s MVA.