By Andrew MacNaughtan

I can tell you a little about the documentary I filmed during Rush's tour in Brazil. As I mentioned, it is finished and being prepared for manufacturing as we speak and will be included in the upcoming DVD release Rush In Rio.

Originally, my goal was to create a short and "snappy" clip of a length of maybe 15 minutes. Quite frankly, I wasn't sure if I had enough material to make anything longer then that, nor did I think that I really had much of a story. It's not all that exciting being on the road with Rush in terms of photographic "eye candy". They don't have raging parties, there isn't naked girls running around backstage nor are there any exciting fist fights between band members. So I asked myself, what the hell is my story going to be.

I decided to just go with the flow and film EVERYTHING! In fact, I had two extra cameramen running around getting all the pickup shots of fans, the city landscapes and "b" camera for when the guys are doing sound check each day. So, to my surprise I got a story that is 57 minutes long.

It took a really really longtime to go through all the footage (47 hours worth of material) and figure out how to build a story ... that alone took several weeks. Once my editor and I established a direction, then we were able to build sections at a time. However, I was still missing the glue that would keep the story together. So I asked the guys if they would do on-camera interviews for me. I wanted the dialog to feel very "conversational" and embrace a casual environment to make the guys feel like they could talk about anything. Of course once again, you'll see that Alex is the funniest person on the planet and added many many moments of humor to the clip. Plus, it will be the first time Neil has spoken publicly in many years. As you know, he is a man full of great anecdotes ... in fact, I had no idea that there is a story behind each of Neil's drum solos and what various aspects of his solos represent to him.

In the end it took over 5 months to edit the whole documentary together. It's full of surprises and jam-packed with cool footage of the guys backstage, rehearsing for the tour in a Toronto warehouse, doing sound check and even Alex lying in bed one morning!

Finally, one of my favorite aspects of the documentary is that I asked the band to pull a bunch of my favorite Rush songs, however without the vocals. I wanted to be able to put cool imagery to music and have several "artful" moments occur throughout the clip. I found that it brought a whole new perspective to many of the songs and gives you an opportunity to really appreciate the complexity of the music itself. I loved working with Scars ... I created a series of high-speed traveling shots set to that song as the guys traveled to the concert venue in Sao Paulo.

Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did making it!

Andrew-