Production – Music Video

The shoot today went really smoothly; though we did have some noise complaints that sent us back on our schedule. The reason for today’s shoot going so well I thought was because of our pre-planning before hand, from the Lighting Workshop last month and our Test Shoot previously we had enough time to gel together as a crew with everyone communicating really well with each other. We also shoot from using some storyboards as reference.

These really allowed us to make sure that we captured all the different shots required for the video with the least amount of performances that the band had to provide in front of camera and also allowed us to be a bit more creative with certain cutaway shots. One nicely composed shot I really liked on set was a cutaway of the drummer playing his kick drum from a very low angle.

This I thought might really work well in the final edit of the film as the music track itself seemed to have an heavy emphasis on the drum and the kick drum in particular.

I had decided to shoot the footage in colour, because I thought that filming in the monochrome setting on the Canon 550D probably wouldn't allow as much creative freedom with colour correction in post. Though I did at times put the camera in monochrome setting as a reference point to see how the lighting set up was looking on camera, the setting up of the lighting for each shot was achieve really quickly as Rob had brought his Lighting Plan to the shoot and there were pretty much spot on in terms of position. Any minor tweaks that we’re made was by me talking to Rob on set and showing him what I thought needed to be changed in order to get the creative vision that Damian had wanted for the video.

And before we started shooting any scenes I would show Damian how the shots looked in camera before recording any footage, this allowed us to capture and be creative with the shadows that me and Rob had set up to be projected onto the back of the Infinity Cove.

We stayed on schedule for the shoot, despite having some complaints from the noise coming from the drums (guess that was to be expected), we probably in hindsight should have given prior warning to the ERC that we would be filming a band and that the noise levels would probably be very high for periods of our shoot; a bonus of the shoot was the decision to shoot digital, as we not only had the Canon 5D MKII from the stores, but we all brought our own cameras to the shoot, which allowed all of us to chip in with the camera work, for alternative shots with the idea that they could be used as nice cutaways in the final edit, Overall a highly successful day of shooting and I’m really looking forward to seeing the finished article in black & white.