Review - Medusa Live In London : The Motion Picture

Review - Medusa Live In London : The Motion Picture

What started off as an idea for a gig movie soon became a piece of art after several issues, set backs and the band having to get seriously creative.

The original plan for the band, Medusa, was to do a gig on a boat and film it so that they could turn it into a gig movie. A excellent idea and they had every set up and ready to go, until the night before the gig. The sound engineer for the gig called and cancelled due to a medical emergency. This left the band hardly any time to find a new sound engineer that was available to work the gig, bring a full sound system onboard, as there wasn't one available on the boat and record the audio from the gig. This problem was quickly solved and everyone could get excited again about the gig.

The next morning, the band set everything up on the boat, fans started arriving, there was excitement in the air as everything looked like it was going to be a huge success. And then the band sat down to review the footage from the 4 cinema cameras they had used and found that 2 of the camera operators had overexposed the footage so much that the footage was almost completely white making it unusable.

To make up for the missing footage, the band organised a second gig at a disused nuclear bunker in London. They invited their fans to go along to the gig with the promise of free beer and being filmed as members of the audience, forever making them part of the film.

Unfortunately, that still didn’t give them all the footage they needed, so they set up a third gig at the legendary Dublin Castle in Camden. Everything was going great until it turned out that there was a double booking at the venue and everyone got kicked out before the end of the gig.

They were running out of options to get footage, so they decided on a completely different approach by buying and customising a puppet to look exactly like Julian. It even had a replica of his outfit and his guitar from the boat gig.

What they thought would be simple process turned out to be the most demanding part of the entire process. For over six months, a small team helped Julian painstakingly modify the puppet for each scene an frame. The moving puppet scenes ended up being just as time-consuming as all the gig shoots combined, but it worked and was a brilliant addition to the film.

The film also has a cartoon sequence of the band members causing chaos around London on the morning of the original gig on the boat and photos of places specific to the band's history.

Although it was a lot of extra hard work, I feel that each element in the film are what make it so interesting and enjoyable to watch. You can see the effort that everyone went to in order to make something that no one had ever done before.

I'm not surprised that the film has had a lot of interest from the BFI and Sky Arts and I really I hope it's popularity continues to grow.

Review - Medusa Live In London : The Motion Picture