After all the filming done and finished, I’m happy with the footage we were able to get and the lessons I learnt along the way. It wasn’t perfect, from my experience with other projects it never turns out exactly how you picture it in your head, and I’m not sure if thats a result of my inexperience, or a fact of life, but I’ll never stop aiming for it, even if it is unattainable. After all, one of the lessons I learnt over the course of these shoots was that while you may not end up with the shot you want, you sometimes get one thats even better.

This was particularly true of the outdoors shoots, as I’d only seen photos of the areas before we started filming and wasn’t sure exactly what I was working with before we began. I’ve detailed my struggles with lighting night time shoots before, but I don’t think I mentioned one felicitous moment that came out of it. We started filming early to get some good lighting, and as the sun set the light turned orange, which looked fantastic with our singers bright orange hair and actually became a thematic colour for the rest of our piece.

Originally we had planned to use cool colours throughout our video, to give the project a mysterious, more witchy feel, but after seeing our subjects hair and the way the light coloured the shot so beautifully I am confident we have now made the right choice in grading more towards orange. It suits the energy and style of the film much better, and I feel like cooler colours would not have meshed as well with the quick cuts and frenetic movement we have planned for the editing.

I’ve complained about some of the challenges from these shoots, mosquitoes and lighting being a major part of it, but a challenge I hadn’t anticipated or encountered before was working with such a large cast of extras for the project. Actually working with a large crew was also new for me. The largest group I had worked with was 3 people, but it did not share the same dynamic as this group. All the members of this group had contributions to make towards the vision and realisation of the project, opinions on how it should be shot/directed/edited. My previous experience has been in crews where there is one director and the others are contributing their skills but not opinions. I’ve found the more collaborative work process much more engaging and successful, and a lot of the shots that I love were a result of multiple peoples contributions. It also made it much easier to co ordinate all our extras with multiple people in the crew. I underestimated how long some shots with just the singers would take, and the extras were waiting around for a while, so it was good to have someone extra to liaise with them and keep them happy. For my next major project I think it will be very beneficial to have someone on hand as general helper/runner, as I ended up being while the makeup and set were being done I went and got dinner, so that no essential tasks had to stop.

I have learned a lesson from every single shoot I’ve done and these were no different. While frustrating at the time, the challenges we faced have helped me gain new skills and appreciation for the process we go through that will help me in my future projects.