Shoot Day

As we began the day we ran into problems as our lead actress was in a Maths GCSE exam as well as one of our group members until ten thirty in the morning. However, we dealt with this issue quite efficiently as we began with completing the set and filming a few separate shots of our other performer performing in his morph suit, which would develop the strangeness and ludicrousness of the video.

The set was quite a simple construct consisting of three main elements. The first being an empty room painted in yellow to promote a positive emotional state with two doors on either side of the room to make the room appear, in a sense, like a stage. The doors were used for some the performers to enter from and exit from.

The second element consisted of splashing paint on all of the walls in co-operation with the music video to emphasize the absurdity, craziness and entertaining nature of the main actress, yet as this caused a problem with consistency we made sure that we filmed all the scenes of the room without paint first so that we did not need to deal with these problems later.

The third part of the set dealt with the after-effects layering that we were going to use in post-production. In this we would ‘green-screen’ the actual performance part of the music video to another layer of a pair of cinema sets in front of the action, or, as it will appear to the audience, the cinema screen. This was our entire set design in a very condensed format. We only used mini blonde lighting from the ceiling as it did not convey anything more than we wanted to show from the actual action of the music video and it was simple and easy to use.

At the beginning of the shoot day the work lay mostly on Tessa and me, as Felix was unable to be with us. At this period we both worked hard on finishing the set and shooting a few shots to incorporate in the video at random parts when the main actress was not involved. As Felix and Ruby joined us I began working on playback at first, which involves pressing play on the stereo so that the performer can listen to the music while being filmed. Tessa was on the main camera, which we used to have allow us to use jump cuts inside our music video because of this we could not movie the main camera at all as it would ruin the consistency of the shots. Felix was on the secondary camera taking more interesting and abstract shots to contrast with the normal wide shot of the stationary main camera. We used Sony NX5 cameras with allowed a degree of fluidity with movement with the secondary camera, yet was not the most useful with the stationary camera as it never moved.

As we continued we rotated the work force around stations so at through out the day we all used the cameras and were on playback. However, I used the cameras least but this allowed me to suggest ideas for shots more or to keep check of the main cameras movement on the TV screen it was connected to, to make sure no one had accidentally moved it unintentionally.

Not a lot of things went wrong on our shoot day, which is a good thing of course, but I believe that we may have been able to film a few more interesting and stylistic shots if Ruby and Felix had not been in their Maths exam but even so I cannot complain as we did what needed to be done. However, near the beginning of our shoot somebody had managed to move the stationary camera slightly which caused quite a dispute in our group as it meant we were no longer able to use the some of those shots. But we figured out that we would merely just not use those shots as we could manage without them as we had enough time to film other ones.

One idea that I had come up with to add to the abstract nature of the video was to have a jump cut where a group of random individuals appeared in the room and then disappeared with another direct cut to an empty room, which would, in my mind, work as the stationary camera would not move so it would appear to the audience that the people did just appear and disappear. However, we did not have any people for this shot so Felix, Tessa and I began recruiting people from around the school to take part in the shot. After a quick search of about 5-10 minutes we found around a dozen people to take part. This shot worked as it incorporates the randomness of the performer as well as playing with the audiences’ perspectives’ to keep them involved on a estranged state of mind.

In our music video we also had a trapeze installed into the ceiling of the studio so that our other performer could use it, as he was a trapeze artist. As we began working on it we also came up with the idea of shooting a few shots of Ruby singing on it, which gave us good material to work with but it also gave Felix the idea to take a close up on the cord of the trapeze while tilting the camera upwards slowing as it gave the impression the cord was moving while not actually moving due to the construction of the cord. This shot works incredibly well as it presents a reappearing thematic element of the video as swinging on a swing prompts the audience members to think back to their childhood memories, where they would move to and fro on swings that always made a child happy. This would in turn cause them to think that the actress is trying to be happy which incorporates the main theme of the song as it involves taking away “the pain”. This shot also incorporates the unpredictability of the swing being in the room, which is a representation of the actress and her style of music and personality to the audience members.

After the shoot day we realised that there were a few shots that did not work and could not be inputted into our music video as they were not aesthetically pleasing or did not uphold the conventions of the music video genre we wished to imitate. For example, we had one shot we thought of using in the beginning where the actress would begin to sing while standing in the room, which was filmed in a wide shot. This shot did not work as it lasted for longer than three seconds and did not cause high impact instantly, which are both two common generic conventions of popular music videos described by Keith Negus. Without these two conventions we would lose the attention of the audience in the very beginning of the video, which never bodes well for a music video. However, we replaced this with a shot with one of the actress falling down onto a mattress yet in after effects we edited it so it is rewinding the shot instead of playing it forwards so it appears that she is ‘falling upwards’, which catches the audiences attention instantly as, like one of the viewers of our opening shot pointed out, “that looks really cool”. It was also a well formulated shot as we had the actress perform her dance backwards so we could easily cut the shot with another one quickly and still make it seem natural as the dance being performed backwards played in rewind would make it look normal again.

In conclusion I have to state that I found the shoot day to be quite a success as we ran into a limited amount of problems and managed to produce some good work though other groups might have become anxious about that fact that two of our main members were absent for the first period of the shoot day. In short, it was nothing short of a really good day, were good work was created which had a right amount of creativeness and imagination from our entire group. I am confident that we shall turn this good shoot day into a good music video, which would make the musician proud as it displays her type personality and style quite accurately for the audience to appreciate and identify with.