Lenses and Techniques

As we are using DSLR's to film the music video it opens up a much wider scope for artistic flare.

There are certain things that we can use and play around with compared to the normal digital camera for example the lenses, as i am a keen photographer myself i have a few that i was able to use on my camera to film with.

The first is the standard lens that comes in the kit when purchasing a DSLR, the 18-55mm. This is a very basic lens with some wide angle at the lower end, which is perfect for the beginner and for the point and shoot as it allows easy use with a small amount of zoom to accompany it,

(insert example photos)

We used this lens for the large majority of filming as its basic and versatile, it creates what we want easily.

 it also has a very standard aperture which is F3.5, which allows you to shoot in low light as it lets more light through the lens. The aperture is basically like the pupil of an eye, when it is bright the pupil will be small to let less light into the eye, the same goes for the aperture on a lens as it will have a very small aperture which will let in less light in through the lens to expose the 'film' with and of course when its dark the pupil will be bigger to let more light in to help you see which is the same for a lens aperture.

(insert pictures of apertures)

Another lens we were using to film with was the 8mm full frame fisheye, this lens is a very acquired taste to photographers and videographers as it creates a bulge type look to the shot (insert photo here).

This adds caracter to the shots and creates a slightly more dyanmic type of shot to use within the music video, of course the lens cant be overused as with any other teqnique etc.

We used this lens in some close up shots to get a wider frame as it has a 178 degree viewing angle, we also used it during the performance filming to again give a wider point of view and to slightly distort the  frame (insert pictures from use)

Another lens sued was the 50mm 1.8, this lens has a fixed focal point and a low fstop which means that it can be used in darker situations it also gives a nice effect with lower fstops as it has a very shallow depth of field which gives great effects and creates great bokeh. 

(insert pictures taken with the 50mm) (insert bokeh)

When using the lens we fixed the focus point and adjusted the focus by moving closer and further away from the subject this resulted in some extremely nice shots letting the subject drift in and out of focus, prime example would be the end of the music video.

(insert clip form ending) 

With the addition of the spotlights behind the band and the 50mm it created some pleasing lens flares, lens flares are caused when there is a bright light shone into the lens and the light is refracted off the different planes of glass to create a slight haze and particles from each plane of glass in the lens.

The lens flares and the drifting in and out of focus created something quite unique for us all to add into our video to give it that artistic sense and feel.

Location Shots by Matt

Tunnel walkthrough from Crazydodobird

Field walkthrough from Crazydodobird

Skate park walkthrough from Crazydodobird

Copyright Letter

To make sure that we were not infringing any copyright laws by using the song 'Young Blood' we emailed the manager of the band to ask permission to use the song for our A2 Media music video, in which it would be featured. Below is a copy of this email that i sent them on the behalf of our group.

Performance Update

Over the weekend we finally got round to filming our performance part of our video which was going to make up the large majority of what was missing.
We needed to film the performance part of the video urgently as time was becoming scarce and the unfortunate freak snow occurrence last weekend yet again back tracked us, we also needed to nail this footage first time around which we know full well is something very difficult to do but as its only going to make up around half of the video it shouldn't have been too difficult.
On the day we took a large amount of equipment with us; instruments, microphones, cables etc. all of which took over 3 cars, we got to the hall around half 6/7 and started setting up, we encountered numerous problems like figuring out how to quite simply plug in an ipod to play the music out loud (in the end we did another trip back to Matts to get some speakers) another problem was figuring out of the lighting that was already in the hall worked, in the end we also didn't use ay of the lights supplied and just used our own.
We didn't fully start filming until gone ten o'clock and continued up until half 12 in the evening, which we all pretty stressed by the end of it.

Anyway so the following morning i went through all the shots i took, less of the ones on Matts camera and start too put it all together in final cut (total of about 24Gb in memory)

Heres a setup shot from my camera:

The Hall was a converted church and was a really nice scene for our video, pretty much all of the shots were shot with the 18-55mm standard lens but i had brought with me a 50mm 1.8 prime lens to give a nice artistic flare to the shots.







The great thing about the 50mm is that because there is such wide aperture is gives a lot of bokeh to the image so the actual part of the image that is in focus is very small, another thing that i was trying to achieve when filming the close ups of the singers and just general close ups was to get some small lens flares without the camera adapting to the change in light, heres just a quick example from saturday:

As you can see from this video the lens flares really give a slightly more artistic look and feel to the video.

Luke and Danny Filming update

Above you can see a video showing clips of our group filming the early stages of the music video. It shows the problems that we encountered well as in the first clip you can see someone in the background which ruins the entire shot. However probably the most prominent problem that we had to overcome was the terrain with the uneven ground making it hard to get clear and steady shots. This lead us to try and make a steady cam out of pipes bought from B&Q which you can see in the second picture to the left. This was not that effective at first but after some adjustments it proved to be useful and helped us with some of the shots especially with the Go Pro camera. In the first picture you can see the way the sunset makes a good effect on the scene in the way the light comes through the trees.    

We each took it in turns to film but we all had a say in what shot we thought was best at the time. When we had a selection of clips we then could decide what looked best and what would fit in with what we already had. The benefit of having 4 people in the group is there are lots of ideas and angles available so we never really get stuck with what to do next.

In the woods we filmed some of the cross fades of the nature shots. Such as the raindrop on the leaf etc. We also got the actress to do her solo wandering through the woods listening to the song we have chosen for the video. We also got her to walk over a fallen tree as a possible idea - just in
case we thought it looked suitable. Therefore we have other ideas to fall back onto.

January Filming

At the end of the last term unfortunately we hadn't finished our video to a good enough standard for the first rough cut, this meant that we had a lot of filming and work to do over the winter holiday but unfortunately as our group member Matt had gone on holiday for the winter, we were unable to film any footage as a group, i however did some lip syncing with my sister to add into the video as it seemed to be a good idea for our video and possibly one of the only things i could have done to add to the video while our group wasn't a whole.
Here is a quick screen shot of the timeline and another of the programme showing some progress.






The fact that we were not all together for any amount of time over the winter, meant that we have a lot of filming to catch up on now that we're all back at school, we all sat down on our first lesson back and planned out what we are all doing next, including all the footage that needs to be filmed and edited in the remaining time span that we have.
(insert pictures of planning here)

Recently Matt and I have been looking around the web to see how we could make our video slightly more arty as that is something that we would like to do, i looked into possibly getting an anamorphic lens to really throw our video out there and making our video more like that of a film, i also suggested cutting down the size of the video to fit that of an anamorphic aspect ratio (2.33/1). Matt looked into a director called DaveMa, a quite professional videographer with a very unique flare to his work, some of the songs that he has done videos to are some that we were looking at and interested in doing to start with. This one video that he had posted on his blog was to the song 'Clare de Lune' by Flight Facilities which was an in depth narrative to the death of two young women, alos filmed in anamorph with 2x squeeze.  We also needed to relate the video back to the song, IE. more relation between the lyrics and the video to back up our idea of 'young blood'.