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'.

First shots