Remainder of Filming

To help us get a bit more organised and realise properly what we actually have left to film, we've complied a list of whats left filming wise.

• Medium shot of me and Nathan (plays the boyfriend) with me looking bored and getting up and walking out.
• Medium shot of above, on the other side of the door to see me walking out at a different angle.
• Close up of my phone writing a text to Ryan
• Medium shot of above
• Pan across two bedrooms, showing the two characters in individual settings but doing the same thing.
• Close up of laptop screen - showing the conversation between boy and girl
• Possibly a close up of boy and girls facial expressions - shows happiness from talking to each other
• Shots on the boy and girl finally meeting properly
  

Ideally we want all of our filming to be done in the next week at the latest, to be sure we give ourselves enough time to complete the editing properly and do the ancillary tasks.

Crowd Fail. Again

Because our filming of a crowd had gone wrong the first time, we decided to find a local bands gig, get permission and film their crowd as it would be a smaller space and any crowd would look like a bigger one because of the smaller space. We found a gig at the Joiners which had about 5 different artists playing including Are We Famous Yet? who were meant to be headlining and were also the same genre of music that our track is. So as everyone else was unavailable i went to go capture some footage of their crowd, however to just our luck, there was hardly anyone there. Not even enough to resemble any crowd with the help of clever camera positioning. This is where we decided to knuckle down as a group and say that we needed to mold our idea slightlty differently as this clearly wasn't working and was going to take too long to get what we needed and we really dont have the time to mess about with the crowd shots.

The Bright Side

So after discussing ways around our problems we realised that this may not be all bad. When watching music channels, people tend to change channel when a song/artist that they don't know come on screen unless they get drawn in by the story/effects of the video itself. So if we don't put as much emphasis on the actual band itself and tell more of a story, then the audience is less likely to switch off and instead be intruiged by how the story will end. With this in mind we feel confident that we can develop the story enough to fill the song, and we're also still going to be using the shots of the guitar, bass and drums that we got previously.

Filming at the Gig/Party

On Friday the day had come around for our gig that we planned to get pretty much the rest of our filming done, because we would have the band, crowd and a venue all ready to go. There was a slight problem before-hand with the times because they had double booked us with somebody else but this only meant that we had to change the time to an hour later and make sure everyone was aware of this. We got there about 45minutes earlier than we told people to get there so that us and the band had time to set up. In this time we also got a number of shots that we wanted of the close ups of the instruments being played however it was at this point that we found out that the band who originally did the song couldn't make it, but Ryan had found out before and organised some other people to come and play the song, so it wasn't a complete disaster. After this we managed to encounter another problem which was that the drum kit had to be back in an hour meaning we couldn't film any shots of the band with the crowd in one shot like we'd hoped because the kit would have to be back by the time people got there, so we decided to do any shots with drums first.

We started off with Ryan playing the drums the whole way through the song (with headphones in playing the track so that he was definitly in time with it when it comes to editing) and me getting several different angles so that we have a variety to cut through when editing, these angles included a close up of the foot pedal, close up of both of his feet on the pedals, a close up of the toms, medium shot of all the toms and a cymbal, close up of the bigger cymbal, close up of the high-hat and a medium shot of the whole kit.

For the lead guitar, shots included a close up of the strings being strummed by the pick-ups, a close up of notes being played on the fretboard, a shot of the whole guitar and another close up by the pick-ups when individual strings were being played, whilst he was playing the song through i moved between these different shots depending on the part of the song so that we have some nice bits to cut to.

This was pretty much the same for the bass guitar however i added in a couple of different angles like being positioned at the end of the guitar and looking up at the rest of it which is quite a nice shot and also one looking down on the guitar as well, we liked this one because you could just see some of the cable leading to the amp in the top corner of the frame which gives it a bit more of a gig feel. We couldn't do the vocals because Tim, who was going to be miming, didn't want to do it in front of people as they had started to arrive, but we didn't think this would be too bad as we could just get the close ups in college somwhere because you won't see the setting.

Now as for the rest of the filming, we came across another huge problem. There wasn't enough people to make the place look quite full and resemble a gig. From the amount of people that had got back to us and said they would go combined with the amount of people who had been invited by other people, we thought we would have plenty of people. We did what we could with the amount of people by getting them to all squash together a bit in one space close to the stage so that when we filmed them you couldn't see the empty space in the back and it just looked like there was alot of people there. These shots weren't too bad however, we feel we could do much better and now have an idea to go to a local band's gig and get some shots of the crowd there.

I think the main point we took from all this is to organise everything so much more and in detail so that we are prepared for anything that might go wrong. For example if we had properly sorted out where we were getting equipment from before-hand we would of been able to organise things around this to make sure we could film certain things in time.

More Filming

Today we carried on with our filming and now that we had decided that i would play the female character we thought today would be a good time to film them. First we got a medium shot of me walking past and looking up (as if i've seen ryan) and smiling shyly so that it shows the audience that there is a likelyhood my character is interested in Ryan, we made sure to keep to 180 degree rule so we didn't confuse the audience and it makes sense when editing, and it's also important because it's as if the camera is from Ryan's point of view, it's what he's seeing. We had to do this a few times as it was hard to get the pace of walking right so that the panning could match and keep nice framing still as it followed me.
Next was a closer shot of just my face but with the same content as above, which we did to emphasise the shy expression on my face.
We also filmed a long shot and pan of me and nicole walking down the corridoor, through a door and outside just to give this section a little more than a random shot of me walking past and smiling. It gives it more context.
We repeated this with another long shot/medium shot of us doing the same as above however this shot was filmed from the other side of the door.

During this lesson we had finalised the method of creating an event on facebook to advertise our gig to people, so when i got home i created this on facebook and invited a load of people to attend the gig as extras. We also discussed re-doing the over the shoulder shots of ryan on facebook so that we can get a close up of the event and him looking to see if my character was attending the party, as we now actually have the event set up and know who the female character is now as well.

Also we came up with another few shots that we could include when filming at the gig -- shots inside the guys bathroom of Ryan talking to someone about the girl being there at the party and being nervous along with an almost identical scene in the girls bathroom with me. We thought this could be a key scene in helping the audience understand the plot and gives the whole video a little more structure and variety. A close example of this is in the FallOut Boy video - Dance Dance about 3 minutes 13 seconds in --