Stop Making Sense - Innovations

Innovations

The movie is notably different from many other rock and roll concert movies:

• It contains very few audience shots (and applause sounds are much less audible than usual) until the very end, during the performance of "Crosseyed and Painless." According to David Byrne's comments on the DVD commentary, this is intended to enable the viewer to form their own opinion about the performance, which he hoped would be confirmed by the end sequence. The only other time the audience appears on film is during wide shots and whenever the camera is at the back of the stage. (The same technique was used by Martin Scorsese in his The Last Waltz (1978) and again in Shine a Light (2008).)
• Byrne wanted no colored lights to illuminate the performers. This led to some unusual lighting methods being used for each song. For example, In the performance of "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)", the musicians perform by a standard lamp.
• Byrne wanted as few distractions as possible onstage. Water bottles were not allowed, and most props were painted with a black matte to avoid reflecting light. An example of this are the Shure SM58 microphones used by Byrne and the other vocalists; the normally silver ball grilles have been replaced with matte black ones. Similarly, the labelling on the Prophet 5 and Emulator synthesizers was removed or obscured.
• Unlike many concert films and videos which use "MTV-style" quick-cut editing techniques, much of Stop Making Sense uses lengthy camera shots to allow the viewer to examine the performances and onstage interaction. There are no close-ups of musicians performing guitar solos, rather full-figure or upper-body shots. The performance of "Once In A Lifetime" memorably consists of a single chiaroscuro shot of Byrne performing his famous moves for the song for just over 75% of the duration.
• During many songs, especially early on, no attempt is made to hide or de-emphasize stage crew manipulating set pieces, bringing them on or off and setting them up, and at the end of the film Byrne invites the stage crew out to thank them to audience applause.