Day 1
At 8:30 in the morning i turned up to Eddie Mears' house, already packed with band gear and we headed off together to Tolethorpe. Upon reaching the destination we hit met with Steve the site manager. To our elation he informed us that the shakespeare company that normally practice there weren't there for the day so we were allowed the fantastic opertunity of using the large open air stage. While the story boards did call for a white room we simply could not pass up this chance so we decided to use the stage, which provided us not only with more psace but a wider variety of shot types and more natural lighting, alongside keeping the contrast that we wanted in the original setting by being an incredibly wide open space with the juxtaposition of the cramped space of the black room. With the new set in mind we set about setting up the band gear in preperation for the shooting set ahead before I set off again to Bourne, set on picking up the rest of the media group and the set of lights.*
Meeting Becky, Luke and Elliott at Bourne leisure centre some 40 minutes later meant we had the cameras on hand and were ready for the filming day ahead. We took a short detour to Eddie's house to pick up the lighting gear and headed straight back to Tolethorpe where Eddie had been waiting patiently. Upon arrival we began finishing preperation on the stage, taking a good hour in itself to ensure all the band equipment was positioned appropriately and allowing the sun to pass overhead to give less of a harsh backlight. After set up was completed, due to the cold weather and, frankly lack of knowledge of the song on Luke's part (Not his fault, he was not made aware of the lyrics prior) we headed inside the hall to have a drink of coffee, warm up and listen to the song a few times. This break was crucial as the morning had already been tough and put everyone in bad spirits and it was only 10 in the morning. This break picked everyone back up, refueling them with energy, allowing us to clear our heads for what it was we were about to do and generally refresh us. Feeling rejuvinated we trecked back down to the stage o begin filming.
Due to the nature of the stage and the scale of it, it proved inconsequential to use the lights we had brought with us as they wouldn't do anything, so we chose to rely on the open aired roof to provide light for the shoot. The next problem that arose for us however, was that we hadn;t brought any speakers with us. Figuring we'd be in a small ish room we thought it would be substantial to play the song off of my phone and mime along. This obviously was not the case as my phone was nearly inaudible in the expanse of the stage. Thankfully the site manager at Tolethorpe has both a speaker set, an amp AND an auxillery cable, allowing us to take that down to the stage, with an extension lead and connect it up as needed. Through this we could hear much better and were able to actually begin the filming. Finally. At noon.
This aside, the rest of the shoot went fantastically smoothly. The number of chairs littered around the stage made for some great vantage point to rest the camera on to get some stationary shots in interesting angles. Both close and far away. We played through the song numerous times to get as much footage as possible ready for post production. The only problem for the rest of the day was the constant cold weather, lowering morale constantly and making a lot of shots frankly, painful. We began by taking whole band shots with stationary cameras, followed by moving cameras, operated by Eddie. Then we moved on to close ups, this entailed the band playing the entire song but the camera focusing on one person for the entirity of the video an then seeing what is useable afterwards. We did this with the entire band and then moved onto specialised shots, such as the 'think' shots and the reaction shots. Alongside any cool tricks and band performances we wanted. e.g. drum stick tricks.
Sadly at around 3pm our shooting had to come to an abrupt end due to all of our cameras running out of battery. Thankfuly we had gotten more than enough footage in the time we had to film, we were merely taking more for safety. Confident in the days work we packed up at around half 3 and headed off back home, reversing the process as before, except leaving Elliott to guard the equipment in our absence.
Day 2
Day 2 began at around 10 am with the cast and crew arriving at morton church as punctual as ever (...). We got every one inside and spent the first 30 minutes having a meeting briefing everyone on what sould be happening during the day, showing them around my house to see the sets we'd be using and how to utilise them. We then got into costume and got ready to begin filming. First we did the nerd scenes by bringing the atari down and plugging it into the TV. with Elliott and Eddie performing those scenes, Becky and Luke discussed other shot possibilities using the surroundings. After getting the gaming scene done we swiftly moved onto the calculator and arm wrestling scenes. Then the argument scene followed immediately by the back together scnene. For these shots every went exactly according to plan with no problems arising whatsoever, light was on our side as was time so the scenes were punched out very quickly. Next, sinc ethe rest of the scenes involved the punk and the girl, we needed it to be dark outside so we put the punk scenes on hold and got to constructing the 'black room' Prior to the shoot i had not constructed the black room however we did have a rough idea of what we wanted. The overall construction of the black room can be found in a seperate blog post. After getting the room constructed with the lighting we wanted we began filming the close ups of luke in the room. Orginially we had intended to only have luke in the black room but luke himself suggested we take close ups of the entire band in this way to create the theme of singling them out, so we did and it ended working fantastically.
We did encounter a prblem halfway through the black room shots as Becky's camera SD was full, to counter this i had to find one of the SD cards from my dad's camera and use that, meaning we had a total of 3 SD cards of footage in the end. While this wasn't too much of an issue it did mean we'd have to be more organized in total. Finally, we got all the shots we wanted and so decided to call it a day of sorts. Becky, Luke and Elliott went home, leaving behind one camera allowing Eddie and I to get the rest of the scenes knocked out in the dark. We waited a few hours for the light outside to get dark before setting up the table outside and filming the lady and the tramp scene, which was thankfully illuminated by the porch lights which gave a beautiful orange glow to the set. We then carried on inside for the nail painting scene and the dvd scene, which went without a problem.
Evaluation
Overall the shooting went fairly well although we did have a few problems here and there we managed to work through each and everyone to get adequate footage for what we wanted to create. If we were to film again we would wait for light to be better for the conditions and make sure the cameras are fully charged before heading out. All the problems were more situational rather lack of judgement so overall we did all we could to handle them and did it fairly well.*Yes the number of times the word 'set' is used in that sentences is intentional
No comments:
Post a Comment