More shooting Dates

On Friday 23rd we attempted to shoot more of our performance shots however, mainly retakes of shots that looked bad when we watched them back on the computer. Our group was not organised enough and we only managed to get the drumming shots done. Although this wasn't all bad as we were able to spend more time on them to make them better. When watching the drumming shots we had filmed back on the computer they looked much better than the ones we had filmed before, and our group was pleased with the outcome.

On Saturday 24th we travelled up to London for our big London shoot. We spent many hours framing and filming shots, shooting most shots at least a few times, as this was our only chance to film in London we had to make sure our shots were as good as we could make them. After getting back and watching our footage of London on the computer, nearly all the shots we filmed were perfect with only a few being not so good, and a few bad ones. However due to the large amount of footage we captured it won't be a problem cutting those bad clips out as we have plenty of good footage to replace it with. Due to our song being fairly short the advantage is a lot of shots can be cut if needed, however this is also it's biggest disadvantage; we have so many good shots it's hard to decide what makes the cut and what doesn't.

Overall the Friday shoot, although not as productive as our others, turned out some good footage as well as did the London shoot, and overall our group is pleased with our progress. We have scheduled to film the remaining performance shots tonight.

First Shooting Day

Our group did our first shoot yesterday of the performance shots of the band. We aimed to complete all of our preformance shots including filler shots of the band waiting for the main singer to arrive. We used the stage within our school to give a lo-fi ambience feel to the music video that we had set out to achieve from the knowledge we gained from our music video analysis' and technical analysis; ie. types of shots. We were able to successfully shoot many of the instrumental and singer arrival shots to a good standard. Unfortunately, some lighting issues were noticed whilst capturing the footage, mainly of the singer's performance and the lighting on his face. Also, we need more of the filler shots that see the waiting band members involved in various activities waiting in boredom for the singer; ie. playing on the wii. As a result, we have scheduled to re-shoot these specific shots tomorrow. Hopefully, our second shoot will allow us to have all the required perfomance shots necessary. To conclude, many of the shots from our first shoot will be included within the final music video but some will be re-shot and modified.

London Location Scouting

Our two locations for filming were the school stage and London, we knew when we were filming but not where in London. So on Sunday Mark and I went to London to find some good locations for filming to use for next Saturdays London shoot. We spent the day "browsing" through different locations, finding quite a few decent ones that would fit our music video very well. We took some photos to show the other members of our group who were not able to attend.

Now that our location scouting is over, we know exactly where we are going on the Saturday and so will have maximum time dedicated to filming instead of finding locations on the day and wasting time. This means that we will be able to hopefully get all the shots we need in one days visit and this will give us more time to film the performance shots and edit our footage.

Some pictures of the locations are shown below:













(Appendix 6a)

Finished Animatic

Here is our finished animatic for our song:



(Appendix 7a)

Animatics

We began our storyboard during a groups meet over the festive period. During this time we were able to finalise our ideas and began to conclude the length of the particular time zones as well as the relation to lyrics and time within the song. Mark focused on the practical factor of the storyboard and began to draw the start of the video as well as the final performance scene involved in our idea. We also discovered it would be easier and time saving if Sam and Ben were to draw their own ideas to create a clearer understanding. This meant by the time this discussion concluded everyone was clear of our idea and could add the finishing touches to our storyboard, we also regularly spoke using facebook to ensure everything was up to date and our level of understanding was still at an adequate level. This meant that when we came back to school our storyboard was effectively complete, however we found there were a small number of shots that had to be revised.
Once back at school we started to film the storyboard so that we could upload them onto Premiere Elements and create the animatic for our music. We are creating an animatic to ensure that our idea was suitable for our song as well as it allowing us to determine lengths of shots and to make sure that no shots were missing and there was no way to further enhance the video. It would also allow us to refine and modify our ideas efficiently so that the video would easy to film. It also gives us an idea of the number of shots that we have to shoot and the length of time we would have to designate to those shots. it was important that we could determine shot lengths so that when it came to the actual shooting of footage that we could ensure we had enough accurate footage for our video. It also allowed us to shorten particular frames ans stretch others, in addition to this we were able to visually see the speed of cuts in relation to the song tempo. This was particularly relevant to the performance aspect at the end of our video and we could see that our video analysis' were accurate in terms of quick cuts being needed throughout this sequence.

(Appendix 7b)