Wish Queen - Behind The Scenes
A few months ago I was approached by my friend Anna, an artist manager to potentially create a music video for one of her artists, Wish Queen. We all got together around a campfire in Ohio and she played me some of the tracks via her phone. I immediately loved the ethereal quality of her voice and the melody of the songs. She explained to me the concept she wanted, was a turn of the century magic show doubling as a music video. I of course was all in. The Prestige is one of my all time favorite films and I jumped at a chance to do something in this style and era.
It started with me refining the concept into a story arch and a stylistic treatment that could act as our north star during production. Of course you can imagine we would have so many devilish details to wrangle in creating a period piece, and assembling the deceptive slight of hand on camera, so the pre-production meetings on this were very elaborate.
Working with Tyler Clark, we decided on a visual treatment of 4:3 aspect ratio, and shooting 48fps sync, for a turn of the century film stock style, digital to analog. I reached out to Peter Marr at Canon, who I worked with for Eric Schwartz’s comedy special and Canon graciously provided us with a c500 and art lenses that absolutely made the project sing visually.
Art department was taken care of by my long time friend, collaborator and set sister Magan Mclaughlin. Mags absolutely killed styling the turn of the century aesthetic and embellished the already beautiful Canton Palace Theater. Wardrobe was very important to the outcome of the piece and Courtney Shutt volunteered to take on the challenge with help from Rose Sullivan, they were able to capture the spooky and historically whimsical vision of both lead actors and the extras.
My Father, Joel Cavalier constructed the magic box to the left, and It was cool to work on something with him for this. He did and awesome job on making it feel very of the time with the material selection and craftsmanship. Emily Orsich painted and styled the box in the vain of 1920’s and influenced by tarot cards, very on brand for the artist.
The whole concept circles around Wish Queen as a seemingly supportive character in the stage act of the Magician. Overtime, she wins over the audience’s affection, while stealing the show from our magician.
When thinking about this concept I wanted to cast a magician who was equal parts charming, and sinister. We also needed someone with a theater background as the performances were all motivated and physical in nature. Grace (Wish queen) and I took a wild shot to ask Paul Sloop, a mutual friend to take on the role, and without hesitation he said yes. I am thrilled to work with Paul on something so special to both of us, and he knocked it out of the park.
The tech and production days ran so smoothly I was waiting for the other shoe to drop the whole time. We did end up running into overtime but captured absolute magic and I could not be more thrilled with what we have in the can. All of this is because of the hard work of the crew and all of our interns who worked so meticulously towards our very detail oriented goals.
Huge thanks to Luke DeJeu for AC/swing work and doing the herculean task of 5 men. Same goes out to Adam Jones, our venue lighting tech who made this period come to life with his many lighting contributions and skilled hard labor on this shoot.
Huge thanks to our interns, Izzy Kipling, Jackie Blanc, Sedona Babcock, Clare Feorene. You guys killed it and showed up over multiple department and had just awesome on set presence. A big thanks to all our extras! You guys took awesome direction and felt super natural and dapper on screen. Lastly, thanks to James Waters, Georgia at the Palace Theater and Peter Marr over at Canon. Can’t wait to share this magic with all of you soon.
