Shoot day reflection

We started off the process of our shoot by building our set the afternoon before our shoot day, this is so we had lots of time to make the set look how we want it, and so that we have more time on the shoot day. We started shooting at 9am and carried on in the studio until 3. We then spent the rest of the day in the recording studio shooting the non sync parts. 

The day before, I felt we were quite prepared once the set was built, however whilst building it we were a bit wary we may not have enough things to fill it, for example we only had a few posters so would not be able to fill the walls completely, therefore we went and printed off some more posters in A3, which I think worked really well to fill gaps. 

Once the set was built I thought that it really represented the concept and genre we were trying to show. I was really happy with how it looked and excited to start filming to see what it looked like with the cast. 

A few days before, we organised the roles on set, I was allocated the camera operator, as this is the area I am most competent in. We also had a director, art director, and producer. The producer was in charge of the clapperboard so I had to communicate clearly with her so that I could make sure it was in shot at the beginning of each one. 

As I was camera operator, I was   charge of filming all of the shots, therefore I had to make sure we got all of what we had planned to and making sure that we had shots at the right angles. 

We started the day by getting wide shots of the band playing in the first set, then went to mids and close ups, doing close ups of each individual band member. We then went onto the performance with the VCR camera. We encountered a problem with the VCR camera as it kept switching off, and we realised we won't be able to use the footage from this camera as we cannot format it. However we overcame this problem by filming the lead singer with the camera, and filming the screen of it, then doing a separate POV handheld shot with the Black Magic camera, where we used it as the VCR was being moved, to make it look like the footage was from the other camera. To make it look more convincing we will put a filter on the handheld shots. 

I think that the performance sections in set 1 worked really well, and the cast performed and interacted with the set really well. They improvised a bit in some scenes by doing things such as picking up magazines and reading them, if we saw something like this that we liked, we would then tell them that it looks really good and to keep doing it in the rest of the shots. We ended up discovering a few effective shots that we hadn't planned, but worked really well.  

I think that I really challenged myself when shooting, as I took on some challenging shots and focus pulls, which were quite hard to do due to the quick movements of the cast. I am really pleased I did this as I think I have learnt a lot more camera skills, and have grown a lot more competent in filming. 

The shot that I found the hardest was the close up of the drummer, as the hands and drumsticks move around a lot and to different drums. Therefore I found it quite hard to move the shot between drums quickly, and get them in focus in time. However I think I managed it quite well and got some good footage of the drummer. 

We then set up the second set, which included a black backdrop with lots of bright lights to backlight the cast. We had to do this and the costume change very quickly, as we were running out of time. However when all the lights were switched on and the cast were in front of them, we were all really pleased with how good and professional it looked. Getting the shots for the second set was quite rushed, however we managed to get everything we needed while making them look really effective. 

I think that our time management was something we could have improved, as we spent ages on the first few shots and found that led to us rushing through the last ones a lot. This is a lesson I can learn for next time that we should set time limits for each section so that we have equal amounts of time on each one. 

Overall I am confident that we got all the shots we needed and am very excited to see what the final video looks like. I think that our production worked very well as a team, and that our communication was very good, so we could get everything done while everyone knows exactly what is happening when.