Ruel turned the warehouse under Mood on the Roof into a rave cave for YouTube Music Nights

Since 2020, Mood on the Roof has lived on the roof of our Sydney studio, looking out across the southern end of the CBD, UTS Tower and all (Sydney has spent the better part of 50 years arguing over whether that brutalist block is a landmark or an eyesore, and we’ll diplomatically call it a talking point). One artist at a time cuts a single take up there, and the list runs from Benson Boone before “Beautiful Things” and Alec Benjamin stripping back “Let Me Down Slowly” to Griff, Vacations, dodie and grentperez. For Ruel’s secret YouTube Music Nights show we took it downstairs for the first time, into the warehouse under the studio, a room we’d long had our eye on for something grimier and sweatier than the roof allows. Google tapped Mude to produce and film the night for YouTube Music.

Ruel sings into the microphone with a hand in his hair, under a single bright light

Background

YouTube Music Nights is YouTube’s run of shows for an artist’s day-ones, the series that took Jack Antonoff and Bleachers home to the Stone Pony, the Asbury Park bar Springsteen made famous, and set Kacey Musgraves loose on the floor of Gruene Hall, the oldest dance hall in Texas.

The Sydney chapter is the handiwork of YouTube Music’s Marion Briand, who played matchmaker between Mood on the Roof and Ruel’s camp and set the whole thing in motion. Ruel’s team turned up with a sweat-soaked rave cave in mind, which was all the excuse we needed to finally throw open the warehouse downstairs, and from there the three of us built the night out together. The full story lives in our write-up of the show, and what follows is the making-of.

Until this year, the only people who’d ever seen a Mood on the Roof film get made were the artist and whoever was behind the camera. That ended on 18 June, when Winston Surfshirt, the funk outfit Elton John once crowned his favourite band of the moment, christened Mood on the Roof Nights in front of a crowd packed in the round, while a D2 Motion robot arm carved full 360s over their heads, a way of filming a live show that, as far as we could find, nobody had tried before.

Ruel’s night dragged that format a floor down into the dark, with YouTube Music presenting and the arm handed the main camera job.

The show ran as a secret on Tuesday 25 August, and getting in meant proving it. Ruel put a call-out on his socials, and fans filled in a questionnaire that sized up how deep their fandom ran, because the crowd is in almost every shot of a concert film like this and who made the cut mattered. The ones who made it had been queued down Queen Street in the pouring rain since midday, and they shared the floor with guests from both teams. Everyone walked in knowing it was a film shoot as much as a gig, so the phones stayed in pockets all night.

Ruel performs in the round to a packed crowd in the warehouse under Mood on the Roof

We kept it on the floor in the round, no stage or riser, with Ruel and his band in the middle of the warehouse and the crowd packed in on every side, close enough that the front row was practically standing on the kick drum. From the first meeting, Ruel’s team and YouTube Music were picturing the same room we were, a 90s New York basement show where the crowd is close enough to be part of the set.

The reference everyone kept landing on was the All-American Rejects’ House Party Tour, which since May 2025 has had the “Dirty Little Secret” band skipping arenas for house shows, backyards, VFW halls and the odd skating rink across the US. Most of the shows have been free and dropped at short notice over Instagram and text, which Tyson Ritter has pitched as a shot at ticket prices, saying live music shouldn’t be “a District 1 Hunger Games luxury”.

The crew together in the studio after the Ruel YouTube Music Nights shoot

The look we were after was the camcorder footage you’d find from one of those basement shows, with blown-out highlights and that Hi8 wobble, which is a strange thing to go after when you’re shooting on Canon cinema cameras and a robot arm.

We shot in colour and graded it black and white and the inspo kept coming back to Ricky Powell, the street photographer known as the unofficial fourth Beastie Boy, who the band name-checked on “Car Thief”. Powell spent the 80s and 90s following the Beasties on tour and walking downtown New York with his flash on, photographing Basquiat and Warhol along the way, and in between he hosted his own public-access show called Rappin’ With the Rickster.

In the finished concert film the sweat on people’s faces catches the light and the edges of the warehouse drop away to black.

The main camera was a STRETCH from Australian outfit D2 Motion, the kind of motion control robot that normally lives on ad sets, with 1.9 metres of reach and a 20 kg payload, and for this one it sat more or less inside the round, working over the heads of the crowd.

We programmed its moves as keyframes before doors and had our crew ease it between them live during the set, so every move came in measured and controlled against the handheld wobble of the cameras roaming the floor around it, while choreographer Zoee Marsh worked out Ruel’s movements and blocking with him around the arm’s big moments.

We also strapped a GoPro behind the arm’s own camera to record what the robot saw, and that footage turned into its own run of split-screen reels, with the rig moving through the crowd up top and the shot it was getting underneath.

Around the arm everything went handheld, with a Canon C70, C50 and C80 working the crush on every side, while a GoPro Mission 1 Pro rode the neck of Ruel’s guitar for the opener, “Hate Myself”. Ben ran the floor as director and DoP, with Aaron Hilborn on B-cam, Benni Ling on C-cam and Rohan Merrill pulling focus in the thick of it.

For “In Your Mind”, Ruel strapped on a Snorricam, the chest rig Icelandic duo Einar Snorri and Eiður Snorri Eysteinsson knocked together in 1996 for a shoestring Maul Girls punk video, and which Darren Aronofsky turned into a full-blown panic attack in Requiem for a Dream. With the camera pointed straight back at his face, Ruel stays pinned to the middle of the frame while the whole room swings out behind him, an idea that came out of the Dijon references passed around early in planning.

Up in the ceiling hung a run of Aputure 300Xs, backed by two Nova P300c panels, all of it on wireless so the presets and effects could be dialled in that afternoon, and once doors opened Nate Flagrant from Ruel’s management busked the cues live. The light stayed tight on Ruel and the first few rows, and everyone behind them sinks back into a wall of water-based haze.

Andrew Troy mixed the set, with backline and audio gear hired from Gig Piglet.

The set

The set pulled from both halves of Ruel’s double album, the lovestruck Kicking My Feet from October 2025 and its heartbroken, Kenny Beats-assisted twin Kicking My Feet & Screaming from June, with “Dazed & Confused”, the song that made him the youngest solo artist to win an ARIA at 16, and “Painkiller” in there for the people who’ve been around since he was a teenager.

It opened on “Hate Myself” from the neck of his guitar, and the rest of the night took in “Not Thinkin’ Bout You”, “Faking Smiles” and “Don’t Say That”, the song he held back from the first record and teased there as a 52-second outro, along with “In Your Mind” with the Snorricam strapped on.

The full set premiered on Ruel’s YouTube channel at 5pm Sydney time on Friday 2 October, five and a half weeks after the show, with Ruel hanging out in the live chat from a ferry somewhere between Dublin and Glasgow. It went up as a collaboration, so it sits on the Mood on the Roof and YouTube Music channels too. On the night, Leo Kaczmarek was on stills and Sam Wixon was shooting film.

Credits