Filming Log

My First Film Shoot

The first shoot I did involved the lip syncing, the shots within the flat and the woods/fire shots. This was okay but it proved hard as Jack did not learn the lyrics before hand as I has asked and he could not stop laughing. The lighting was also a problem because there was very little natural light in the room and no room for spotlights, so we had to make do with normal, tungsten, house lights; this did not produce the high contrast imagery that I wanted. The shots in the flat went well and I got them all done on time as I had planned but the lighting again was an issue as if I had used the lights in the hallway shots, it would not have matched the bedroom shots; so I was stuck with no interesting lighting.

The footage of Jack walking through the woods got shot well and within the first few takes, but I had serious issues when trying to get some video of the flames on the fire because the wood was all damp and the fire would not catch. This set me back - majorly!

My Second Shoot

My Second Shoot was the guitar parts. I had to film myself play these pieces within my bedroom, so it was herd to get the lighting, angles and focus exactly right because it is impossible to be in front of the camera and behind it simultaneously; but I think they went well. I used a strobe light which I bought online a few weeks prior to filming; this gave the video a faster paced, metal theme which is an expected convention of this genre of music video.

My Third Shoot

This shoot was an attempt to recapture some of the failed shots from my first shoot. I had a little bit more luck with the lip syncing and my unreliable lead actor but the fire still would not work - and after looking at the weather forecast, I realised that I would have to change my plans by a great deal because there was lots of snow on the way; so I made the fire in my back garden and used only extreme close ups and shots which did not give away location changes. At this stage, my video was starting to look a lot less like my storyboard.

My Final Shoot

This final shoot was just cutaways and pick-ups such as the writing and the drums. This all went well once I had got a technical issue with the camera sorted out - this was where the camera kept picking up big black lines across my footage and rendering it useless and causing me to re-film.