It’s a cold December morning, it’s the day before christmas and everyone is doing there last minute christmas shopping and going about the their own business when a man dressed up as santa collecting for charity starts to sing. Now there’s nothing odd about that you might say but then to other people run in singing about mums with big bums is Debenhams and it starts to get odder and odder from there involving a ghost and an angel from M&S cheering up the depressed looking santa. This sounds like the very odd plot from a festive TV program that’s usually on around christmas and it is of sorts. It is in fact the plot to the Christmas Episode of ‘Nine Stories High’ which is the Welsh National Operas very own Soap Opera Opera performed every month on the streets or some where within the centre of Wrexham.
I’ve been working on Nine Stories High for 4 months now meaning I have done all 4 Episodes up to date and with everyone I still think how strange what we are doing is. This month the episode was filmed in Eagles Meadow down near the cinema and on both levels that are there meaning that the action progressed from one level to another and not only did we have 5 opera singers to film we also had a choir to film who were part of this episode. All in all we had 5 maned cameras capturing what happened over the 3 performances, where we usually have 3 manned and one static camera. After the first performance you start to get the idea of where the performers are going to be standing as it’s very difficult to rehearse with the amount of space your going to have where ever the performance is going to be so the first one is usually see what happens and capture it as best as you can which isn’t usually to hard but it’s good to see how the performers move in the space.
I really like working on Nine Stories High it’s lots of fun to do and it’s definitely changed my pre-conceptions that I had about opera. Which is the aim of the WNO’s project to try and introduce people to opera and show them it doesn’t have to be for posh people in the theatre and that it can happen quite literally anywhere.
(Episode 4 Will appear here when it is released )
