Evaluation of Shoot Day

The day before our music video, Wednesday the 22nd of November, we begin preparing our hardest set, the ‘shower curtain.’ This required fluorescent light tubes and a 10 foot white sheet manipulated into a shower curtain type thing. We then proceeded to iron it, as it was quite wrinkled. It is photographed below. 

Once we finished that, we got the white infinity sheet ready, behind the shower curtain, ready for the next set. 

In the morning of my shoot day, I woke up very confident and excited. I didn’t have any reason to be stressed, because I had brought everything we needed for the music video into school, a week early, so all we had to do now was simply shoot what we had been preparing for the past month.

I felt very well prepared when I arrived for our shoot. I knew we had all of our costumes and props at school, and that our set was ready to go. We arrived on set early with our actors and discussed our expectations for the day, such as when we would be needing them, and what they needed to do in the meantime. We had two dancers, who were only going to be shot 4 hours after we started shooting, so we told them to go to the dance studio to prepare their dance and catch up on school work in the meantime. 

We shot our most difficult set first, and so the studio looked like the above picture. I was worried, initially, how our concept would be transmuted into the physical set, but after building them and seeing how they looked on camera, the worry ceased. I feel that I managed to create the look of my concept well, and stayed true to my initial idea.

We divided the roles before the shoot day, saying that we would each direct and do the camera work on each of our three elements. That said, however, on the actual shoot day, we took matrix roles in that sometimes someone had a good idea for directing, and so directed that take, or someone wanted to capture a certain shot, and so hopped on the camera. There wasn’t really any anxiety about who did what, and instead we were more concerned with the overall music video, and getting all that we needed to get to make the editing process easier. 

I think I personally did the organising aspect of the music video well. In that, we had all of our materials and costumes ready to go before we started shooting, and there was nothing that you could call ‘stress’ on set. In addition to this, I feel all of our pre-production work, as a group was well managed by me, through me deliberating who would do which task and setting deadlines for certain tasks.

We didn’t really have any ‘problems’ on our shoot day, as everything basically went to plan. However we had one trivial issue where we found two spiders on one of the couches in our video (Pictured below), and we were worried our actress wouldn’t want to lie on the sofa. The way we solved this issue was to not let our actress now about the spiders, by telling her to go on a break, and then proceeded to vacuum every crevice in the couch. After having a few once-overs, we deemed the couch ‘spider-free’ and continued with our shoot, without it causing any more problems. 

I think the most successful parts of our shoot was with our 1 element, our white and red couches. I felt after the shoot, that I was the most confident with the footage we obtained from those elements, and visually on camera, looked the best.

One part of the shoot I wish had gone better was the dance. Our set wasn’t big enough to facilitate some of the dancer’s dance moves, and so, unfortunately, we couldn’t capture some of their dances. I wish this had gone better, as it would’ve been valuable content to be able to cut to when editing our music video.

I think I managed our talent very well. I didn't hear any of them complaining, during or after the shoot, and they seemed to be content. In addition to this, all of our actors got sufficient breaks and rests throughout the day, and we were still able to wrap on time. 

The part of the shoot I enjoyed the most were filming the modelling shots. This was my favourite part as you didn’t have to worry about the actress remembering the words, or the dancers staying in focus, and instead we just looked to see how to make our actress look like the most beautiful woman on the earth, and thats it. 

The thing I’m most looking forward to seeing in the edit is our shots of the dancers, as they were by far the most creative; we played around with focus pulls, some handheld shots and tilts and pans. 

I think our production group has worked incredibly well as a team. I have no complaints about my team, whatsoever, and all of them were proficient in meeting the deadlines I set with our pre-production work and gathering of materials. On the shoot day this well oiled machine of a team was clearly shown from no arguments and being able to convey what we wanted to do next, with our actors and sets, almost without words.

I learnt today that just because you plan something well, it doesn’t mean the music video will all fall in place. There was a lot of work that went into filming the music video, which I had underestimated. Now I know just how demanding filming a music video is, for any future shoot I do.

I don’t think there will be any changes that will need to be made to our website and digipak. This is because we stayed true to our initial concept in the actual filming of the video, and so amendments to our plans shouldn’t have to be made.