Construction Post 3: Week 3 Production

This week was used for filming our real shots. We had to organise everything around our school timetable, which is already full of lessons. Managing how to deal with coming straight from a lesson and thrown into the studio, where our shooting took place was, to me, the hardest part as well as usually having to deal with 13 hour days at school.

The studio- the set/our location for the week

DAYS 1-2

The Priority for the shoots on these days according to our shoot board was:

Extracts from Monday's storyboard

• Our individual beauty shots
• Individual spotlights
• The group one shot singing the whole song in one set up (so we have a base to away to from other scenes during editing) 
• The majority of our chorus dance shots in most setups done.

However the inevitable issue of time made achieving all of these in those two days very hard that we realized we had to re-shoot many of them on days where we had less planned. I was responsible for noting down which shots we didn't get to do and reorganize them for another day.

After Tuesday- star means it needs re-shooting
and has been rescheduled while crossed
out means the shot has been filmed

e.g. Tuesday's shoot-board had the most re-shoots labelled out of the whole week- this was because some shots had to be done due to either lighting issue which had taken up too much time and gotten in the way of filming or that it was realized afterwards that the lighting didn't look right

Me setting up the focus of the camera
for the filming of our red silhouette set up
 on monday

Before Tuesday

Monica and I sorting out
the red spotlight floorlight

I'm proud of how well our spotlight shots went. For me and Thakshana's spotlights, we were able to film them in just one take! That was because after our test shoot part of the feedback we got from our teachers was that we should spot the turret lights to make the circle we make as tight as possible. We learnt that spotting the turret light on the cyclorama rather than the black curtains wouldn't distort the circles and also keep them in a tight shape. Using the 'Trouble' music video by Neon Jungle, we decided to frame this shot at an MS. 

Reflecting back on the first day of shooting:

DAYS 3-4

Day 4 was the day where we started utilizing our main and exciting setups. For example the strobe setup and the panel backdrop. 

Since we weren't able to test these setups beforehand it was really also a session used to improvise and the decisions we made on the spot, I feel, were really good decisions in terms of creativity and making the best of what we had. 

Little Mix-'Move' (inspiration)

E.g. the strobe setup we had planned for to be with a black backdrop, but we realized that you wouldn't be able to see our faces with just the flashing strobes alone. So I had to go up to the lighting desk and fiddle around with the lighting until we could agree on something that suited our theme but still hadn't before yet.

Example of lighting progress on day 4

We had achieved a lot of lighting progress during day 4 as opposed to days 1-2 before. I think this is because we'd gained a lot more confidence on what we wanted from lighting by also using day 3 of shooting to watch over and reconsider some of our previous shots with adjustments to them. This meant that we didn't end up spending as much unnecessary time on fiddling with the lighting for each setup. Below is an example clip of us in the middle stages of fixing the lighting for Angela's shot. 

Thakshana, Monica and I watching back
the chorus dance shot we just filmed

Filming me and Monica's chorus
 dance shot

Analysis on one of our chorus group dance shots

DAYS 5-6

Shots completed: Days 5-6 were used to either re-shoot any scenes and to do all the shots that needed the most complicated, industrial set up. This included all the group one shots (singing/ playing with balloons etc.) Thakshana's individual verse and any more chorus dance shots. 

Setting up the D4MES graffiti backdrop, trying to make
it industrial looking

Us trying to sort out the lighting
for Thakshana's Industrial setup

This setup was definitely the hardest to work out the lighting for because the floor-lights kept creating shadows or would end up being concentrated (spotted) in a certain area rather than flooded the whole way through. We decided to just film through it all; in editing we would be able to work around the distraction of shadows.

I was able to learn a lot about directing and the importance of constructive criticism as I was in charge of filming Thakshana's shots with Aaron (one of our male actors).

At first both of them felt really awkward doing such an intimate shot in front of the camera and weren't really sure how to continue their movements for the long period of her verse as you can see from the video on the right.

However after a few more takes and us three brainstorming ideas on how they could move around the huge space they had on set, we were able to come out with a decent shot, exampled by the clip on the right.

Preparing for filming the dinner scene:

  

General Problems faced:

1) Focus- The auto focus on the camera wasn't working so had to be handled manually, this led to problems with shots going in and out of focus every time the camera changed distance from the subject (person in front of the camera). An example of this can be found below.

2) Actors- Some of our actors, for their own personal reasons couldn't make the days we asked them to come in and act for us, which caused a bit of hassle as we would have to reorganize our shoot board and change our individual schedules

Solutions found:

1) Focus- Sometimes the problem of focus was inevitable, since we wanted the majority of our shots to be handheld and fast moving, so and we would just have to edit around it. However where we could move the camera around slower (in order to give the camera more time to focus on a subject and thus not become blurry, like in the example video below) we did.

2)Actors- We had to be flexible around our actors as they have their own personal lives and we were asking a favour from them to help us out. So when they couldn't make a shoot for various reasons, we had to work around them and swap shots from a day when they are free to do in place of the day they aren't free, so as not to waste time.