Shoot Day 03/11/14

This was our first studio shoot and we really felt it, starting at 0930 and finishing at 1745. Admittedly, things did take much longer than we had anticipated; with us not starting shooting until 1200. However, once we had started shooting, it didn't take very long to gather our footage, and as time went on we got much more comfortable being in the studio and working with our equipment.

Our first set up was for the silhouette performance shots, in which Yssy and myself had to try and match our actions without being able to see one another; eventually we got an idea of where the other person would be standing and what they would be doing at each point in the song, but it did take a large number of takes before this happened.

Messing up positioning (Turn on Captions)

Setting up the lighting for this shot did take us a while, not being helped by the fact that the retractable seats in the studio had been left out, which required us to wait for the site team to remove before we were able to properly get a look at how everything appeared on camera.

Even with the various delays and frustrations with this shot, I am really happy with the way in which these shots ended out; even managing to get some footage of Yssy walking into and out of the shadows, which looked absolutely amazing.

Due to all of us having lessons throughout the day, once we had got the footage, 2 of our team had to leave for lessons; meaning that it was left to Harry and I to take down the white back drop and prepare the projector for the fire performance shots. Yssy and Matt returned at 1425 and set off to prepare make-up, costume and finalise the set, whilst Harry and I went to lessons; all of us agreeing to be back in the studio, ready and set to go by 1550.

It hit 1550 and we were all up for getting on with our shots. Yssy had a good understanding of the meaning behind this set up and as such, took to performing with the fire projection in the background instantly. These shots are much more lively than the other performance shots, allowing Yssy to be much more physical and encouraging her to move around the set much more.

Yssy moving around set

Yssy encapsulated the meaning of these shots really well, so once we had some really good footage of her moving about, we opted to test some of the shots with the camera moving in a random fashion.  These however, didn't turn our quite as pleasant looking as we had initially expected; being quite shaky at times and at some points, cutting out part of her body while she was performing. I was the one responsible for filming the movement, because i was most confident behind the camera; however, now i know that this is something i must practise if we are to use camera movement in any of our other shots.

Image from footage captured with very dull colours and out
of focus

Upon reviewing the fire performance shots from the shoot, we became less and less fond of the quality of the footage. While a lot of the performance was great and it was what we wanted, the colouring of the footage was off and looked somewhat "stale" in a sense. The colours were very dull and weren't appealing; this to some extent being due to us using the Canon Legria HFG30, which didn't capture the bright and vibrant colours of the flame projection very well. In addition to us opting to use auto-focus, because we thought it would capture Yssy's movements better than us having to manually adjust it. Unfortunately this was bad judgement on our part, because the camera constantly re-focused due to the moving flames in the background. Meaning large sections of our footage were  out of focus.

We decided as a group, that it was best to re-shoot this footage; this time using the Canon 5D, which gives us a better depth of field and allows us to control more aspects of the images.

Unfortunately, by the time we had finished the fire performance shots, it was so close to the end of our shoot. This meant that we were unable to complete all of the shots we had planned for this shoot, meaning we had to reschedule them for another occasion. We were fine with this, as we had been quite ambitious with the shoot, without really understanding the practicalities of a shoot. A real learning curve for me in particular as i make adjustments to our current and future shootboards.