Production Review

Production Review

As I have mentioned in my filming day review posts, this is the summery of the whole production of our project, reflecting on the highs and lows of filming our music video.

We planned to film initially at 12 different locations; we ended up shooting at 11 only because the river that we wanted to film at turned out to be a rotten bog and we did not want our actors to go in the vile water, we then scouted out another river in Winscombe, but the water levels were low, because of a recent lack of rainfall. This was not an issue, however, because we had come up with a different idea. Another scene in the woods, this we could fit in. We had to our actors Joel and Archie to use my father's axe to chop up some logs, in slow motion. As mentioned in another blog I found it hard to find the slo-mo setting on my GH4 as I had not used it for so long, something that I could have tested a little more before filming on Tuesday.

Overall, though every day (other than Monday when Joel was a half hour late) we were filming on time and schedule. We managed our time so well because we had planned out in the pre-production how much time we would have to shoot at each location and we had also estimated how long it would roughly take for us to capture all the shots we needed for certain scenes. Calculating the times would not have been possible without Kasha’s schedule and Archie’s shot list, these were both useful to me as the cameraman.

Other important things to reflect on during the whole filming process was how much travelling we had to do in Archie’s car. Archie’s car was a life saver for us, as without it we would not have been able to film in half the locations we planned to, as we would have been too reliant on our parents.

I mainly reflected on all our techniques on filming day reviews, which contained how we capture shots on certain days and for example why we needed to reshoot at the Revolver Record shop, however one error I would like to point out on my end was how I had two GH4’s with different lenses attached to each one. This is fine and its normal to shoot with two different lenses, the problem was, one was not set to auto white balance and one was set to record with warm colours as we had planned to, this made things a lot harder when it came to edit where we had to completely colour correct the whole video. The colours changed so often between the two cameras. Some of these colour differences can be seen in practical skills section on the blog.

Lighting was also something I talked about quite a bit on my filming day reviews, without my bi-colour lights our film would have had half the impact it did. The reason I thought of using and even purchasing these lights was that when I was on a university shoot months ago during the filming of my last project, I saw that on this shoot without the astute lighting skills of some of the technicians on the shoot with us, you could never achieve the same look if you tried to light your film in post, that is why I made the decision to purchase the lights and that is why I believe we should have little to no grain in our movie. To achieve no grain, I filmed most of the low light cinematography on my 42.5 mm lens with an aperture of a wide f1.7 which lets in a tone of light, then I lowered my shutter speed to 25 down from 50. The sacrifice to making this change, is that you have to keep the camera incredibly still to be able to trick the viewer into thinking it is even a shutter of 50, to achieve this trick I just mounted the camera in a tripod for most of the shots keeping the shoot still with as little motion as possible. The result of this knowledge was as some have told me ‘professional’ looking shots.

Finally, as there was not anything I haven’t mentioned in my filming day reviews, I was just surprised how much of a difference this shoot has been compared to my last college project where we had to shoot and edit all in the space of 3 days, this time we have had four weeks! We got our filming done in the first week with a re-shoot on the following Wednesday. This is all thanks to Kasha’s incredible planning and the whole group's amazing effort and commitment to the project.