I’m really pleased to finally be able to share this new work for Naim Audio. And I’m honoured to have been asked to create this content for a truly historic product which will undoubtedly leave an important stamp on the Naim Audio timeline.
Since the beginnings of Naim audio, founder Julian Vereker often considered a Naim-designed turntable. Tragically, he never realised his plans before his untimely death in 2000. Naim did however create the iconic ARO tone arm in 1989 which set a benchmark in terms of its natural, organic and lifelike musical performance. With learnings from the original ARO and their advancements in ultra high fidelity audio engineering, Naim have designed a one-of-a-kind turntable, next generation ARO tonearm, Equinox moving coil cartridge, solstice series phono stage, power supply and bespoke accessories set.
The Solstice turntable combines core Naim design philosophies, such as multiple levels of mechanical decoupling, with a celebration of beautiful materials. It features a magnetic bearing supporting a high-mass, highly polished aluminium platter, with a unique, self-calibrating motor drive system, meticulously delivering the Naim sound.
Legendary Naim Technical Director, Roy George, came out of retirement to work on the Solstice Special Edition project, explains: “I still often think about Julian, and how he would have regarded the products we have designed since he died." "I believe he would have very much approved of the engineering solutions and final performance of the Solstice Special Edition.”
Fast forward to today and to the inception and creation of Solstice, this new dawn for music promises a turntable designed for the highest possible reproduction of musical purity and the most organic, authentic and lifelike performance that can be extracted from vinyl.
Communications Manager for Naim Audio Angela Collins’ original brief was the kind you dream of as a creative. An invitation to create a piece of work that not only showed off this stunning piece of engineering and craftmanship, but one that honoured the brands history and had a more profound story to tell, inspired by its namesake.
Being located in Salisbury, only a few miles away from the World Heritage site of Stonehenge, Naim audio didn’t need to look far for naming inspiration for this very Special Edition, nor did they need to deviate from their own heritage: although Solstice is their first turntable, they have been venerating vinyl since the genesis of Naim in the late 1960s.
Solstice, a name that represents the maximum (or minimum in winter) declination of the sun and marks the longest and shortest days of the year is on it’s own loaded with important meaning. When linked to the culturally important monument of Stonehenge it signifies something much greater. Although, to this day, Stonehenge’s function is debated, it is without doubt a place that fascinates and implores a great degree of wonder. Simply trying to imagine how humans around 3000BC would have constructed such a site which aligned perfectly with the sunrise on the Summer Solstice and the sunset of the Winter Solstice boggles my mind. And without modern machinery, it’s nothing less that astonishing.
In order to try and capture the magic of the sun spilling through the stones at StoneHenge, we wanted to create Naim’s new turntable its very own space, one that represented somewhere that perhaps could exist in the realms of reality, but also felt somewhat unworldly. A space that would allow the product to be revealed by the rising of ‘the sun’ and would allow us to create a shaft of light that felt real and inherited that sense of the magic hour.
Working with visual artist and designer Nat Cook, we designed a set that would allow us to position the product within the sightlines of an aperture, big enough for us to cast light into the room revealing Solstice.
Once modelled we shared the designs with Naim and after a few tweaks started planning our set build phase. First we ‘chalked out’ the set in the studio using Polyboards for walls, a magliner for the sideboard and a set of Apples boxes for the stairs. I had intended to shoot the majority of this project on the Canon RF 50mm f1.2 for photography and CN-E 50mm T1.3 for video. Both lenses provide extremely high quality, but the 50mm focal length would give a more natural field of view without too much compression, which I feel can sometimes make things feel inorganic and thus not quite right for this project. Creating this mock-up set gave us a good sense for how big the space will be once constructed, allowed us to visualise the shots and ensure the set will be big enough to shoot with the intended cameras / lenses.
Click the below video for a short overview of some of the pre-production and set build process.
The set was built by Julian White over a four and a half day period, with Alex Rose (Et Al Interiors) taking care of the arches and stairs. On the last day we carried out a pre-light thanks to lots of help from Andy Cahill, before cracking on with the shooting. For our key ‘Sunrise’ light we used a Arri 5000W tungsten fresnel. Tungsten was picked not only for it’s warmth but for it’s outstanding colour rendering quality. It felt like the closest we could get to reproducing the magic hour glow of the sun. In order to get the movement of the ‘sun’, the light was mounted on top of a dolly track which enabled us to smoothly move our light source through the scene. Flags and blackout were used to cut the light before the point of ‘sunrise’.
Photography and filming was completed in two long days before we needed to strike the set.
I’ve never really minded seeing a set being taken down before, but for some reason I had grown quite attached to this small world we’d created for Naim’s new Solstice turntable, however it had to go, so the set was demolished.
We did ensure however that as little went to waste as possible. The MDF walls were repurposed within another building project, the stairs donated to a trader, the arches given to another production company as a background prop and the flooring kept for another shoot.
For the teaser I wanted to capture as much ambiguous footage of Solstice as possible, heavily backlighting the product. To emulate the moving light of the sun that we had in our large set build, I fixed an Aputure 60x to the Rhino motorised slider and programmed a simple movement behind solstice.
That about raps it up. Thanks for reading through and I hope it was interesting to see how we put together this production. Click the link below to view the full film.
Thank you to the following for being instrumental in bringing this to life.
Nat Cook - Set Design, Styling.
Andy Cahill - Lighting, Gaffa.
Julian White - Set Build.
Alex Rose (Et Al Interiors) - Building the Stairs and Arches
Adam Prosser - Help with inception of the moving light ‘sunrise’ concept.
Angela Collins and the whole Naim Audio team.
Photography shot on the Canon EOS R5 with RF 50mm F1.2. Macro shots captured using the Sigma Art 70mm F2.8
Video shot on the Canon C200 with CN-E 50mm T1.3.
Video edited and graded in Davinci Resolve