Filming Day 3

Filming Day 3

Today is Wednesday the 24th of April, only a small shoot but probably the most important. The filming we do today will be for the opening and closing shots of our music video and will be mostly without music in the video itself.

We began by paying Darren, the local Wrington village hall caretaker, £8.25; the money was rental for the hall for one hour. After this we got cracking, Bence and Archie set up the dolly while Kasha was talking to our senior actors, running through their lines with them. Meanwhile, I was getting chairs for the actors to sit on, as well as finding a suitable table, then proceeding to set up my Steadicam.

Once all the props had been appropriately positioned in the correct places (Kasha’s job) I got to work and began with our dolly pull shot. This was difficult, possibly the hardest and most important shot I had needed to capture so far, I needed to pull back the camera about 15 meters, in a straight line. The movement went about as well as I thought (ok), and it ended up taking about half an hour out of our hour just to do this one shot, yes there were some shakes even on the best attempts, but I could not think of another way to do the shot, other than use rails or a massive crane! The shot was a dolly pull, one with both senior men and one with only one senior man, as one of them passes away, the other one is struggling to let go of his brother, we thought this dolly pull would be good to bring out emotion, as it was the last shot.

Things were not all perfect however, there was one issue, with our last shot, there was some swaying movement in the last dolly pull shot. I then worked out that the swaying movement was because the floor in the Memorial Hall was uneven and therefore, we moved on as we were unable to perform a steadier shot. We finished not knowing if the dolly pull was a success or a fail, I do not know how it will playback in the final film, but I do know it will require a little bit of editing!

Next, I captured some close-ups of the props on the table in between our senior actors; these would be edited in at the beginning of the video. These were successful, I captured some with my Steadicam and some with my other camera (42.5mm lens) on a tripod, with a behind the shoulder pan. I then captured some more shots of the men talking to each other while moving around with my Steadicam, then we captured the audio we needed for the beginning using my video mic pro plus mounted onto the 42.5mm lens GH4 about 20cm away from our actors’ mouth, to reduce echoes.

After this, I captured a top-down shot of one of the men putting on Pink Floyds record ‘The Dark Side of The Moon’. This shot looked good as I got Kasha and Bence to hold the soft, warm Bi-Colour lights above the record to bring out the tiny lines in the record itself and make it look like the suns reflecting off it. I captured this shot using my 42.5mm lens attached to a tripod.

Finally, today the last shot that I captured while everyone else was packing Away was the men playing cards around a table, I captured the shot with my Steadicam, though this shot may not be used as we are not sure it is needed to tell the story that we want to tell.

Overall though a very productive day, some very good footage was captured. Only one day of filming left as we no longer need to film on Thursday anymore, this was because we captured this footage on Tuesday instead!