The day began with us learning the lyrics to an extract of the song 'Get Lucky' from Daft Punk's new album Random Access Memory as this is the song we were giong to lip-sync to. The studio was set up in three ways to enable three different performance spaces; a room with a sofa, the rocky side of a cliff and a green screen wall. We split the whole group in half and one group set up a camera on the 'cliff' and our group set up a camera on the green screen.
Next we allocated each person a job; director, cameraman, sound engineer, floor manager and assistant but before we got on with our own jobs we decided to have a wide shot, a medium close up, a close up of the subject's face and then some more abstract shots, for example, her body and feet.
After filming this the groups moved around and so we filmed on the 'cliff' next. I was on sound for this section so I didn't see much of the filming, but the group used a dolly to create a tracking shot of one of our group members walking by the cliff. On the third set, I came up with the idea of filming more than one of our members sat in different places around the room and then in editing, we can layer the shots to make it look like people appear and disappear, on the beat. We also did close ups of eyes, mouths and feet.
At first, there were a few shots we couldn't use because the subject didn't know the lyrics as she didn't have much time to learn them, however after printing the lyrics off and running through them a few times, the problem was solved and we continued.
I really liked the shots of the eyes and mouths because I think that the extreme close ups in juxtaposition with the wide shots create interesting contrast and I didn't see any other groups with extreme close ups of features so it was nice to have individual ideas.
We could've varied the angles of our shots more as most of them were at a front-on angle but if we'd have changed the angles a bit, perhaps using a Dutch Tilt, the aesthetics of the whole video would've been more interesting.
I enjoyed using the studio as its artificial qualities meant that we could control the lighting an surroundings to create almost anything we wanted or needed.
We used synthetic lighting, including redheads and blondes and to ensure the lights weren't too bright and blinding for the subjects, we used spun to dim the intensity of the lights a bit. The lighting worked well but we had to keep an eye on it whilst filming against the green screen because if a shadow is cast on it, it won't work when it comes to editing. We were careful in checking for shadows and this meant that it wasn't a problem.
During editing, I tried to cut on different beat patterns, instead of just every 4th beat, in order to keep the video interesting and fast paced. I started with the shot of Leila's eyes and then used the other group's low angle shot of Tom on the sofa to contrast this- I liked the other groups shot because it made up for the variety of angles which we lacked during filming.
Also, whilst editing on Final Cut Pro, I found that because there were so many layers of footage on the timeline, sometimes I could hear sound that I didnt' want but couldn't see where it was coming from and had to scroll down really far to track it down. Before I'd worked out where the noise was coming from it was disturbing the editing process but once I'd figured it out, it wasn't a problem any more.
Through doing this practise run my editing skills have developed a lot because this style of editing is enturely different to that which we used when editing out thrillers as sound and timing is much more important- especially as out thriller didn't rely much on timing as the narrative was quite abstract.
During filming, we all worked well as a team and managed to gave a go at most of the jobs available. When editing, I worked on my own, which I enjoyed because it meant that I had free-reign on what I could create.
By the end of the day, I hadn't finished editing the video, but I'm hopefully going to go back and complete it because it's really enjoyable. I was happy with what I'd created and had a really productive day, both in terms of the film I created but also the skills I learnt and I'm looking forward to making a whole music video with a concept I've planned and can really get my teeth into.
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