Review of day 1 filming

Review of day 1 filming

Day 1 of filming proved to be a struggle as I found that several things did not go exactly to plan, firstly my initial location for hacker scenes to be filmed i.e. one of the science rooms proved unavailable. Therefore I had to fall back on my contingency plan which was to film in the science office, this however also proved to be unavailable as well since I was told due to specific documents held in the science labs I was not allowed to film ever. Because of this, I had to review what type of room I would need to film such a scene, eventually it was decided that I'd need some sort of office space with computers, which could suggest some sort of computer lab and eventually I settled on IT2. This proved to be a suitable substitute as it features the desired amount of computers and wires to convey a messy computer lab and had the right darkened lighting to connote something sinister to the character we are filming.

IT 2- features dark lighting and a good amount of computers to suggest a computer lab

After attempting to capture some of the Hacker scenes, I then moved onto capturing the more abstract scenes of the video, which necessarily did not need that many people to star in and thus proved to be much more convenient and easier to film. However, these scenes proved to be quite messy as we were using props such as confetti, toys and orange juice to create a strange distorted look for the video. During the shoot however, I did go off my storyboard plan and filmed some experimental shots playing around with the scenes and types of shot, perhaps this will serve in the future as extra footage just in case I run out of footage whilst editing.

An image from the shoot - I believe this image best describes the sort of tone of my music video perhaps this image or sort of imagery would be fitting for the design for the digipak

When I first filmed the hacker scenes initially, they were filmed during midday using the cloudy weather to help with lighting and create a gray tone to the shot making the scene much colder and sinister. However, the weather proved to be something against the shoot and every now the sun would come up, alter the lighting, and in turn the mood of the shoot. Because of this, it was decided to shoot later in the day around 3:40 to use the evening sunset to get dark enough shots to convey something cold and evil but not so dark for viewers. Whilst filming one of the hacker scenes one of the problems I ran into was devising a way to get a close up panning shot of the hacker's hands since the tracking dolly was too large to fit on the surface of the desk. To get around such a problem me and one of my friends built a smaller tracking dolly out of a phone, book and glue sticks.  

The makeshift tracking dolly

However this idea when executed didn't work as much as we planned since the camera would get caught up in wires and our makeshift tracking dolly would fall apart therefore our shots were very shaky. After the shoot we then decided to investigate alternatives to this problem, so far we have devised one possibility which we believe will be the solution to our problems; building a mini tracking dolly out of Lego.

The Lego tracking dolly

Finally, during the shoot we also managed to capture footage in the desired ASCII effect I previously mentioned in a post but when exporting the footage from Ipad to computer I noticed a large downgrade in video quality. On the other hand, this was probably caused by the fact that I converted the footage from MOV to mp4 format, which can sometimes downgrade video quality in the process. I have decided to re shoot said scene and this time I won't use video conversion or perhaps finding a better source for video conversion would solve the problem.

Overall the shoot proved to be quite problematic but most of these problems are easy to solve and some of them have been solved.