Day of filming - Performance

Today we went to film the performance part of the filming, we turned up at 10am to make sure that we had enough time to get all the filming done that we needed.

We had to make sure that everyone turned up in the costumes that we needed them to be in, casual is a broad range so it wasn't hard to stick to, this standard was met by everyone in the group and that made it easy to get started and get filming.

We first of all had to get the room set up the way that we needed it, this meant that we had to move all of the chairs and tables out of the way as it is normally used as a classroom, we had to move all of the stuff to the side of the room to make sure that we had enough room to film and get a number or different shots as we needed a good variety of shots to make the music video look interesting.

The next thing we had to do was get the props that we needed. We needed a drum set, a microphone with stand, and two amplifiers. We got these from the music department as we filmed in the half term, hardly any people were in the college at the time, so they were available to use, this made is better for us as we were able to get all of the equipment we need to make the scene look as professional and as realistic as possible.

I then had to start to get the lighting to where we needed it to make sure that everything looked as good as we wanted it to, i started off with all of the lights off and then started from 1 and worked my way through the lights to the last one, Kyle Smith was in the tv studio so that he could tell me when a certain light was too bright or not bright enough, some of the lights weren't on at all when others were on fully, the headset that we used made it a lot easier to get the lighting right, that way i wasn't just guessing on which lights to change, that would have taken me hours to get right. At first we had it too bright(photo below right) until we turned off certain lights to get it so that the lights weren't too bright for the band members.

 Next was getting the cameras up and ready to film with, we used two different cameras, one bigger camera to get the steady shots, this camera would be staying on the tri-pod that whole time of filming, there was also a slightly smaller camera that we used, this was to get the other shots, there was some other shots that we did using this camera, we got shots that moved around, panning shots, tracking shots and shots from a different angle as what the bigger camera was filming, to again give us a variety of shots. This was the key part of the day, making sure we got lots of shots, but shots that were different, there would be no point in having loads of shots if they were all the same.




Danny was in control of the smaller camera whilst i had to bigger one, he would go in between the band members whilst they were performing and get shots that i couldn't get with my big camera on the tripod. He got the panning and tracking shots.



I suggested that it would be a good idea to play the song through and come up with a plan on the things that we would film, I thought it would be a good idea to film in the same order as the song, that way we would know where we were up to with the filming. We had to shoot the same parts a number of times to make sure that we had a variety of shots, we had to use both cameras and change the angle and position of the camera, and re-film. We did this to make sure that we had enough shots to switch between them, this is because as a rock song we need there to be fast edits, and switching between different shots would make the edits fast and they would look more professional and it should ideally switch on near enough every beat.

The chorus was the easiest part to film as the lyrics were easy for the guys to learn and they were able to get the lyrics in time with the music every time, we had the music playing in the background off of a computer in the same room, this is so that the guys would be able to sing along and therefore get the lyrics in time with what the music will be when we edit. Otherwise it would be off time and would not look as good.

I did a lot of the filming off of the big camera on this way as well as control the lighting, I believe that i did a lot of work and contributed a lot to the work on this day, i had the move the camera around, change the height of the tri-pod and decide on what shots would come next, i tried to make sure that we had a large variety of shots off of the camera that i filmed off of to make it easier when it came to editing, it would mean that we should not have to re-film. I got close ups of the lead singer, long shots of the whole band and mid shots of individual members of the band, i also got shots of the guitars and the drums to have them to edit between the shots of the singing.

Lastly we filmed the last part of the song itself, this was because i suggested to do the last chorus last because it might look good to mess with the lights for the last part of the song, i stayed in the lights control room and messed around with the lights, turning them up and down quickly, this looked good on camera and is a contrast between the normal performance as well.

We then had to film the part of the music video where the late guy rushes into the performance space to find no one there because he missed it, we could not film this as the Go Pro camera had ran out of battery and so did the other cameras at this point, so we couldn't film this part, we plan on filming this part as soon as we come back from the Christmas holidays.

Then we had to pack all the things away, we had to get it back to the way it was before we used it, we had to take all of the music equipment back to the music department and move the black backdrops out of the way and put the chairs and tables back into place.