Construction Post 2: Week 2 Production

In week 2 we began filming our main and final shoot. We came prepared with all of our revisions from our test shoot and attempted to improve on what we had done previously. This was another long and tiring week, but we were aware that this hard work was needed in order to create a music video that we could be proud of.

Below I have included a picture of my group's filming schedule. The schedule is colour co-ordinated in order to show the different set ups that we would be creating. This was highly beneficial to our group as we were able to allocate each day to a different set up, ensuring that we stayed on track to finish all the shots required. This also meant that I could map out the different make up and costume looks that I would need for each day in advance. Overall, having a properly planned out schedule was vital to our shoot week as it meant that everyone knew what was required of them for the day, resulting in a more efficient day of filming. The behind the scenes clip that I have included illustrates the importance of the schedule as it is the first thing that I refer to when explaining our plans for the day to our technician, Emma.

Our schedule

Monday 
On Monday we decided to film our projection shots for the video. This had proven to be a tricky set up in our test shoot, so we thought it best to begin the week doing this in case the footage had to be retaken. Despite learning from our test shoot, perfectly positioning the projector still proved difficult for our group. We eventually overcame this issue by placing the projector on top of various objects such as a stool and wooden blocks until we achieved the results that we wanted.

During this day we were able to use our revised projection footage which consisted of brighter footage as we had been told that our previous footage was too dark and blocked out my body by casting too many shadows.

After a suggestion from our teacher to create more interesting shots, we used this opportunity to experiment with different shot types and even tried incorporating some movement into these shots by experimenting with some dolly and hand held shots.

Below I have included a short clip of my group evaluating how we think the shoot day went...

Tuesday 
We then went on to film our strobe lighting shots on Tuesday. This proved to be another difficult day in terms of lighting as we had to experiment with different ways to make the strobe lighting appear bold without washing out my face. This day was particularly hard for me as I found it very difficult to keep my eyes open whilst the strong light was flashing.Eventually we decided that these shots looked better when my eyes were closed as they no longer looked agitated. However, I feel that this day was also very successful for me as I became more fluid in front of the camera, allowing us to create more artistic and aesthetically pleasing shots. I practiced different types of hand movements that could be incorporated into the video in order to increase the movement as suggested by our teacher such as the one below...

One of my hand movements

Wednesday

An example of the fairy light shots

On Wednesday we filmed our fairy light and microphone set up. The fairy light set up was one of our easiest to set up as it involved turning out the lights and placing myself under the string of fairy lights that had been set up. However, this set up was also very tiring for me as I had created a set of dance moves in which I repeated under these lights in order to achieved our desired silhouette.



The microphone set up proved to be a more difficult one as we struggled to create camera movement here. This was because the legs of the Dolly kept on barging into the microphone stand legs whenever Jerom would attempt to film close ups. However, once we overcame this issue we began to use different techniques such as pans and zooms so that we did not recreate the static footage of our test shoot.

The new microphone shot created 

Thursday

This was our red/blue lighting and stool set up day. This day proved to be very difficult for us as the lights in our studio had stopped working properly. This was due to the Gel Filters on the lights becoming stuck between two different colours rather than just one. This meant that rather than getting our desire red or blue shots we could only achieve a sort of purple lighting. This caused our group a lot of trouble as we ended up spending several hours attempting to fix the lights and decided by the end of the day that they would require engineers to fix them. Despite this major set back we were still able film some stool shots with very faint lighting, however, through grading I was able to make the colours stand out more and pop.

Our final stool shot.

Friday

We did pick ups of any shots that we had yet to film on this day as well as filming some specific shots such as the candle ones. Although this day was allocated to re-filming any shots that we thought we could improve, we were limited as to what we could film due to the lights still not working. We had to arrange our candle shot for this day as we had to be supervised by our technician, Emma who arrived armed with a fire extinguisher. Although we knew we wanted to incorporate candles into our video in some way, due to not including such shots in our test shoot we did not have any idea of how we were to arrange it.  I decided that it would be a good idea for me to wear an 'off the shoulder' shirt so that we could create close ups that used minimalism. This eventually led to us experimenting with a series of voyeuristic shots such as ECUs of lips and half face shots which we thought looked very effective and decided to compile them in order to make the opening of our song.  This shot proved difficult to shoot as I had to lift my head up then blow out the candle without looking at it. I also had learn how to blow out the candle without puffing out my cheeks so that the action appeared effortless. Here is a snippet of some of the behind the scenes of this shot which shows the process of preparing it...

Overall, this week was a great learning curve for me as it gave me hands on experience as to what working on an actual music video set is like. It was an extremely tiring week, however, I think that it was worth it as we came away from it with footage that we loved.