shoot day evalutation

The day before our shoot day I went to the studio to look at the set build and worked through my props list with my group to discuss what needed to be put where, we thought the rooftop for our attic was too small, however we worked round it by placing our artist on a stool. We began to move our props into the attic set to make it look authentic and also thought about what costumes we needed and set them up on a hanger on the side of our set. On the morning of our shoot day I woke up excited for the process of our first music video but also nervous of the outcome, I went through a final list of shots and thought about what we wanted to achieve. When arriving to set, I felt prepared however we had a lot of teching to do with lighting, because we didn’t have access to the lighting equipment the day before, although this set us back an hour or two our artist was stuck in traffic so we had time to fill to make sure everything was set up ready for her arrival. The studio looked professional with the lighting and the smoke machine to give the attic an authentic dusty look, everything looked very realistic and we had our cameras set up ready to film. Because we had a professional artist I took the role of chaperoning on the day, we gave tom the role of camera man and Ivan directing and playback, however we all took turns trying each role evenly to gain an experience of all aspects of filming. I therefore took an active role in everything.

Personally I think the role I did well was the filming and chaperoning, I made sure the artist was happy and made sure she knew what was going on at all times, I was also picked to do some tricky tracking shots, which although I found difficult I enjoyed. The problems we had on set involved timing, the hair and makeup for our artist took way too long and unfortunately we weren’t able to capture all the shots we wanted due to the time difficulties however we got round the problem by organising pick up shoots, another problem we had was our actor was unavailable for our pick up shoots, we therefore had to cast tom in our shoot, leaving me and Ivan to shoot the music video, we worked together and got it done, doubling up on roles.

The most successful part of the shoot was definitely the performance element, because our artist was a professional the lip sync worked really well and was easy to edit in the end. The part I wish had gone better was definitely the second performance element, because we were rushed for time, we didn’t get all the shots we wanted however we still gained enough material to produce a good end product. However the second performance element is definitely the part I’m most looking forward to editing as the shots we did obtain worked really well and created some cool effects with the projection overlapping on our artist.

Our production group worked so well together helping each other on the day we were able to give advice to one another and use our skills to make the best video possible, at one point when doing tracking shots all three of us had to use the camera, and this was a good example of how we worked as a team to get the best shots possible. If there is one lesson I learnt from our shoot day is that you need to prepare for time issues, and definitely to be more organised when it comes to hiring makeup artists as this did set us back.