Account of Shoot Day

We had our shoot day on Friday the 18th of November, 2011. For this day we obviously had to prepare a lot. This ranged from building the set to choosing the costume and to sorting out our props.

We tried to build as much of the set as we could the night before our shoot day. We had a slight problem time wise since the group before us could only start around mid day, so they could only finish by 6.30pm. This meant that we could only start setting up at about 7 o'clock. During the two hours in which we set up we started by carrying in the raised floor, then we set up the walls around them. We did this so we could build in the right kind of lighting for our 'electric feel' sequence of the video which had to be particularly colourful. We set up the walls for three sides of the set, leaving out a bit upstage centre in order to include a bay window. We then covered the basic walls with cardboard sheets since we could not put the wall paper on the walls themselves. After screwing the cardboard boards to the walls we started wallpapering them. This was a very time consuming task since it included precision and careful measurements in order to fit the pattern of the bits of wall paper together in order to link. We stuck the wallpaper on the cardboard, using a special type of glue, which needed to be pencilled on the back. After that we just put the carpet on the floor and we had our basic living room as we wanted it. Overall I think that we were very effective and precise in building our set and I was very happy with the outcome. We ended up with a room which looked like an old fashioned living room which was exactly the type of thing which we were hoping for since our video is set in a house party. 

The next morning we finished our set as quickly as we could by arranging the furniture, the band and any other lighting constructions which we hadn't done by then. Whilst the other three members of my group were doing this, I went to the dance studio and started rehearsing with the dancers. Since I am not that much of a dancer, they had come up with a thirty second dance for our video, fitting the main beat of it which meant that we could use it anywhere we wanted. We went through the dance a couple of times until everybody was happy with it and then they started putting on their costumes and make up. Meanwhile I went to find the other members of our cast to get them ready as well. I asked the three members of our band to start rehearsing together in order to get used to playing together since they had never done that before. After that I then asked our two main characters to get into their costume. Whilst the set was being set up and everybody else was rehearsing I then started painting our Electric Girl with UV paint, in order to make her stand out from the rest of them. Luckily we all finished at the same time and could start shooting pretty much on schedule. I think that we were also pretty efficient with the preparations in the morning since we managed to get everything done pretty quickly.

Around 10 o'clock we actually started shooting. Richard was doing the camera and I was directing and doing the playback. We started by doing the normal party scene which included introducing the viewer to the house party and introducing the connection between our two main characters, leading up to the kiss. We knew which shots we wanted to do and came up with little pieces of plot whilst going along which resulted in more material which we could use overall. We also had some shots which had to be cut as they were logistically not possible to do, such as the shot of our protagonist tripping over the sofa as he was following her. We encountered a bit of time pressure since we knew we only had the dancers until lunch time which meant we had to get the non electric feel section and the electric feel section pretty much done before lunch. Except for the fact that we would have lost the dancers at lunchtime, the were a very big part of our party, which meant that it would have looked very empty if we hadn't had them for any of the narrative. So after we got the first section done, we then decorated everything for the 'Electric Feel' part. This included painting the dancers, which took quite a while, and it also included trying to get UV on the rest of our cast too. We ordered UV bracelets and necklaces, UV contact lenses (worn by our protagonist Andrew) and UV paint which all made the party look more interesting, creating the juxtaposed contrast between the first section and the second section of the video. 

Once the UV paint arrived and we borrowed some from the theatre department, we had to test it on all of our cast in order to see whether anyone got an allergic reaction to it. To find that out we went around and applied different colours to different people the day before, which would have given us enough time to find a solution if there had been a problem. Luckily it all went well and everybody was fine with it.

After making the necessary to our set and cast we started recording the second part of our video. This started with the dancers. We put them on the set and looked at the image we got on camera. The lights we had switched on were the lights around the sides of our set and a couple of extra lights spinning around and projecting patters on the walls. Along with that we obviously also had our UV light turned on which made the paint come out very nicely in the shot. When looking at the shot I decided that the lights on the sides were too much for the dancing shot so we turned those of. We ended up only having the UV light and the moving projectors. Once we had established the lighting set up for this and had increased the aperture on the camera in order to slightlylighten the image up, bringing out the paint and features of our dancers more clearly, we started shooting it. We did a wide of all of the dancers, a close up of every single one and a couple of detail shots, which we could include in our video.    

After we finished with filming the dancers, we started shooting the performance aspect. First we did the 'normal ' half of it where we covered all the shots we had planned, and featured each band member and appropriate amount of time. After that we then did the 'electric feel' half of the performance aspect where we had to change the lighting and use some more interesting shots in order to convey the excitement of the second half of the video. After filming all the planned shots on the band, we just filmed the rest of the party and tried to get as many shots of the electric feel party going on as we could, in order to stock up on narrative and material.
      

 

Overall I think that this was a very successful shoot day and we got everything done which we needed to do. It was a very stressful day for me, mainly directing whilst the others were filming and standing in for people in the actual video. I think we could have gotten more narrative shots than we did in order to have a stronger evidence of it throughout the whole video. But overall I am very happy with the material we got and the range of shots which we managed to collect. The fact that we have such a big range of shots is going to make it easier for us when we are in post production.