On the 19th November, Elliot, Max and I booked to use the school gym after school for a couple of hours to start shooting some of the band scenes for our music video. As the gym was fairly big, with lots of empty space, this allowed us to experiment with all the lighting, and a couple of cameras at different angles and view points. The large amount of space we were able to work with made the use of props (drum kit, which was booked in advance) much easier to use and move around.
The photo above shows the set up for our shoot, and how all the lighting and cameras were placed to focus on the drum kit which was seen as the object in the film shots. We had to use tape to mark on the floor where each guitarist would stand, so they would be in the frame for each camera, which were at different angles.
Here is an image of the Go-Pro we used in order to get close up shots of the instruments and the finger movements on the guitars. We only used this Go-Pro for the guitars. It was really useful because you could link the Go-Pro up to an iPhone and see the imagery on the iPhone whilst filming so you knew what the quality and positioning was like. This was simple and easy to do and therefore only took a few minutes to get around 30 seconds of video recorded. We held the Go-Pro in place because if we used the 'sticky mount' it would have been hard to move the Go-Pro from guitar to guitar. Huw simply held the camera in place and we adjusted the angle to get different shots.
This photo shows Elliot and Max on set, when we decided to try out the smoke machine which our teacher was able to get for us. We used this to add depth to our lighting when filming to create some very dark and creative band-like shots. The fact that we could utilise the large gym meant the smoke spread quickly and evenly so we were not completely hidden in smoke whilst on camera.
Overall, the shoot went extremely well, even though it faced several challenges in terms of lighting, the smoke machine and framing, which we all managed to tackle sensibly. And although we were time pressured due to a late start because of the lack of availability of the school gym until 4pm, we got a lot of brilliant work done with these shots we have taken, providing us with near a minutes worth of filming for our music video. We will review what we have filmed on Thursday 20th November and begin to start editing the shots so that they are ready to be incorporated in the music video, when new scenes are filmed.
