Shoot Day

We set up the studio the night before the shoot day in order to have as much filming time as possible. We began our studio set up by firstly fixing our blinders together and connecting them to a power source, after testing the blinders and making sure they weren’t in contact with anything that could have caused a risk or fire hazard we used a cherry picker to hang light bulbs in the appropriate spot that we marked out using white duck tape.

After we were happy with the lighting we spread out bags of dried leaves again making sure they were not in contact with the blinders or slippery on the surface of the floor, after the leaves were evenly spread and the blinders were functioning properly we drew the blue-screen curtain across the back of our studio and laid down lights to illuminate it. Finally we set up the instruments such as the instruments (drums, mic) and did a final check of power for the speakers and the CD player for the playback.

For our planned shoot day we assembled in the morning at around 9:00am. Once everyone who was needed was present we gathered the band together and gave them instructions on what they needed to be doing throughout the day, for example who was needed at what time and how we wanted them to perform, the band then got changed into costume and took up positions while me and my group bubbled the tripod and set up the camera and looked through the camera in the main shots to see that there was nothing in the shot that wasn’t supposed to be there, for example on a few occasions leads and lights for the blue-screen could be seen so we combated this problem by simply moving some of the dried leaves so that they could not be seen ,this did have a risk of causing a minor continuity issue.

We used a JVC-1500 E to capture our shots. Once we had light up the blinders and blue-screen lighting we played the track and started filming. Once we had captured all the shots in a fixed position we laid out the tracks and captured the tracking shots we wanted, after this we brought out the cherry picker and set up the camera on it so that we could get hi-angle shots. Once all the shots that we had planned we had some time left over to film any extra shots, at around 1:00pm we started to collect the equipment (tripod, red-heads, generator, light bulbs and leads, tracks ect) however, due to the weather we could not go out to film and waited to see if the weather cleared up so that the conditions for filming were good. As the weather did not get any better we decided to postpone the performance filming to a later date. The conditions were much better a few days later so we gathered anyone involved in the performance element and decided to film the following day, this was so we could avoid any inconvenience to clashing commitments. The following afternoon we gathered the appropriate equipment and drove to our desired location in the Peaslake woods, which was conveniently close.

After arriving at the location we set up the light bulbs and generators, as this would have been difficult to do later on at night as the leads were black.

The temperature was very cold and we had a limited time to shoot so we set up the light bulbs and box so that we could shoot and then simply move the camera a short distance and quickly start filming again to efficiently use the time we had.

Once the sun had gone down and the light conditions were good we started filming our actress was already in costume as she changed before we left again for timing efficiency. The performance shooting lasted around 4 hours and we used torches and the red-heads to light up the location wile we packed up.