Mill Meadow - Filming Day 2

Mill Meadow - Filming Day 2 18/11/2019

Our team today would be Anna, Jed and I, as I received a message from Jack early hours of Monday morning saying he would be unable to come as he was unavailable; however, we would manage the day okay. Regarding Dan, he didn’t fancy the drive down to Taunton, so he stayed back at college and cracked on with the animation editing.

I woke up at around 5 : 30 AM to be able to get some breakfast in, then I got to the Mc Donald’s in Worle for 7 AM half an hour drive from where I live, I then proceeded to pick up Jed and Anna, and we drove non-stop to Mill Meadow, which took around 50 minutes. All of the equipment we brought was mine, including two GH4’s, one of which would be capturing time-lapses while we were at Mill Meadow and the other would be mounted onto my RONIN SC. I also brought with me two bi-colour lights and three tripods to mount the lights and the time-lapse camera. I also brought with me, my Phantom 4 to fly it around if we did have some extra time on our hands, turns out we did not.

When we arrived, I gave Chris a call, and he met us in the car park, much like last time, he then gave us some keys to a property where we could make tea and coffee if we wanted and use the toilet facilities. Meanwhile, I was setting up the intervals on the time-lapse camera; I set it on auto-exposure; however, this was a bit of a mistake as when I looked back at the time-lapse video it was apparent when the camera had decided from, let's say to go from f2.8 to f11. However, the footage is still usable, and that is the main thing. After setting up the time-lapse camera, I set up the RONIN and proceeded to set up the shots for the hot tub, the main reason we travelled down to Mill Meadow so early. This is because it is usually colder in the morning; this means that the steam from the hot tub would be more visible. We captured a lot of footage, utilising my bicolour lights to emphasise the bubbles in the water.

We shot in slow motion at 96fps (in 1080p and cinematic at 24fps also in 1080p. If it were my choice, as we are creating a film for a company, we should have shot everything in 4K; however, the team disagreed as the Macs in college are not powerful to edit the crisp 4K footage. If I were the editor, it would have been fine, as both my systems have the horsepower to edit such content, it does annoy me that we cannot shoot in 4K as there is such a big difference, but I can live with this.

Anyway, after painstakingly taking 2 hours to film some B-Roll of a hot tub with complicated lighting setups, we moved on to shooting the lodges, however, before this we did more of the time-lapse camera to a different angle, at the lake at Mill Meadow. While grabbing on to the fence to support me on the hill where I was positioning the camera, I did find myself, electrocuted. It hurt, a lot, but I walked away unscathed, just a little shaken! Filming the loges were simple, I am getting good at gimble movements now, so I managed lots of sweeping motion, panning, tilt shots; you can use the gimble like a portable tripod which is fantastic! It saved so much time and turned what would have been a 2-day shoot into a 4 hour one.

There really was not much of a written plan for today, I just knew what shots in my head I needed and fortunately we were able to capture every single one of them, the hot tub b-roll, lodge shots, cinematic shots of the lake, three time-lapses and 4 shots of the Mill Meadow sign for Dan, to make the animations with.

I will talk about one shot which was a pain to capture, it was one where I would pull the camera through a buoyancy aid, by the lake revealing both the buoyancy aid and the bright sun behind it, It took around 15 minutes to capture, however, it was worth every minute, the output was a perfect looking shot! While we were filming by the lake, we left a camera across the complex, filming the main lane that links all the lodges, and it created a good-looking time-lapse, that looked brilliant. Then when we finished capturing the footage of the lake, we packed everything away, collected the camera at the bottom of the lane, bagged that up too, then headed off to college for our afternoon lessons!

Overall, I think we now have all the footage we need for Mill Meadow to create two good-looking films. One will be 30-seconds to 1 minute long and the other will be 2 – 3 minutes long, we will then send both copies over to Chris, one will be for the Mill Meadow homepage and the other for a longer look at the whole establishment. I am enjoying working on this project; I hope we can make something the College and Mill Meadow are happy with.