Account of Shoot Day

We arrived at the studio about 9 o’clock in the morning. We wanted the day to be as relaxed as possible and for our performers to feel comfortable. However, we soon realised that Jess had left the storyboards at her house, this was potentially a huge problem, but luckily we knew what a lot of the shots were to get going in the morning. Fortunately, her mother brought them into school so we had them for the afternoon. However, we had to get going regardless, so we begun the day by getting both our female and male singer ready, we wanted our look to be fairly of the norm and simple. Both our stars wore jeans and white tops; this look was simple yet really showed who they really were and their organic, natural approach to music etc. However, Melena wore some slightly kooky make-up, this was used to enhance her individuality and show that she is a bit unique in her style. Once the duo were all set and ready to go, we just put the music on repeat and let them both get into the mood and play around with what kind of choreography they felt comfortable doing. We wanted them both to feel relaxed as this would make the final piece look so much better.

Nearing 10 o’clock, we begun filming – we just did a few takes of the whole song, from start to finish in wide, as this would be the basis of our performance element of the video. However, once we got underway we realised that the positioning was not quite right, so we began to rearrange the performers in order to gain the best shot possible, placing William further the centre of the shot. Also, once the cameras began rolling Melena found it quite difficult to move and sing directly towards the camera, because we wanted this sequence to look extremely natural, it was very important that we got this in the end, and she did really up her game, but still at times she was very unaware of where the camera was positioned. As, we only had a day to shoot this we had to move on fast, as we all knew roughly what we wanted to be shot. Once we had filmed the wide shot of the performance section we moved onto close ups of the instruments. Again, this seemed to take a lot longer than it should have, as ‘William’ (Callum) cannot actually play base, in the wide it was not noticeable that he was not actually playing but in a close up it was very. Therefore, we had to spend a little time going through some of the basics, although this put us behind schedule a little; it enabled us to get the shots we needed. With Melena, it was fairly simple – we just wanted to shoot close ups of her singing really at this moment rather than on the keyboard. Although, we again encountered this problem of not looking directly into the camera, but we had to work with what we got.

We realised we were running on a very tight schedule, we still had more shots to film in this setting before we took a break for lunch. We hoped to break at 12.30, but that did not happen – we broke at 1pm, as we had to shoot the more ‘fun’ side to the duo, the shots of them messing around the leaves and Melena wandering up and down the tree trunks. Around this time, my group had a little argument, because one of the members of our group wanted to try out this new shot she had thought of, we were all willing to go along with it, however, it was not going as expected and this person would not give up until she got what she wanted, but this was being proven very difficult. Cutting, the story short we were just all trying to speed up the process, saying how it was necessary to move on as we needed to complete the filming in our time scale. Eventually, she did give in and we did move on – but as we were approaching our lunch break it was a bit of a mad rush to finish all these shot in time, it was impossible. In the end, we broke for lunch without quite finishing what we had anticipated. However, this made us all come together as a team during our break and realised that we had to just get on and not waste any time in the afternoon.

We came back for 2 o’clock, and we had set ourselves a task of getting these shots completed in fifteen minutes, all we wanted was shots of William sitting on the bench singing whilst Melena danced around him – although we wanted to experiment with angles we had to just get on with it and shoot what we could.

Around half past two, it was vital we moved on. The next set was ‘the bikes’. Both the bicycles were already set up on the platforms ready for us to begin shooting. We positioned them into the centre of the studio. We wanted to create a windy day scenario, so we had the fans blowing from a short distance away to make sure it was not over powering as some leaves were blowing across the shot. We decided to just get on with the following footage, for this set we mainly just needed to go through the whole song a few times of them singing, performing and ‘cycling’ and most importantly having fun. After a couple of takes, our female performer had a small accident and fell off the bike, thankfully she was completely fine and just laughed it off, although we were all quite worried it would knock her confidence and then not give us the performance we really needed from her. However, we took a quick break to boost up her energy and then continued with this set. Throughout this set it was easy for our group to take turns being on camera and be creative with the shot types as the set was quite simple etc.

After about an hour of this set, we realised we had to move on and move on quickly. Our final set was ‘the boat’; this meant we had to completely clear everything in the studio. We got everyone involved, ensuring all the leaves were swept up and put back into the black bags. Once everything was clear we were able to bring in the wooden waves and place the material along the studio back wall. All in all, this took about thirty minutes to set up and then we were ready to shoot the final concept part of our pop promo. By this time, everyone was beginning to get tired but we all picked ourselves up and tried to make the last hour as fun as possible. Our wooden waves were very large, so we grabbed a few friends to move them to help create the moving wave effect we wanted. Again, the shots we needed were mainly in wide of the duo just joking around and having a laugh, so again we were all able to take turns filming on the camera and on the playback, all being able to get involved was really good as we were able to get a feel of both being on camera and also just being involved in terms of creativity and getting our opinions and ideas across. The last hour of the shoot day was however very fun as we all knew it was drawing to a close shortly and we wanted to get the best out of the day. Both our performers were very relaxed by this time and were really able to go for it to finish off the day.

About half past five we finished, our time frame was up and we had completed our shoot day. We then had to clear out the studio, to allow the following group to set up.

As a whole, I felt our shoot day went extremely well. There was a very relaxed atmosphere throughout the day and it allowed everyone to feel comfortable and for us to really get all the shots we wanted. However, obviously there were some moments which were fairly tedious, either our group were having a disagreement in the shot types or the performers were lacking energy and we were just pushing on at them to really deliver. But all in all, I defiantly believe we have a wide variety of footage, and hopefully we can now edit the footage successfully in order for our pop promo to be of a high standard that we wish to achieve.