Our second shoot for our music video was a studio shoot. We split this shoot into two halves. The first half featured purely the leads and then second half included the extras. When we first arrived I started to set up all the equipment and prepare the projector for our planned projections. We ended up projecting some of the footage of torchlight illuminated moving leaves onto the places of the two lead girls. It ended up being quite effective, with the warm torchlight suiting the color of the singers bright orange hair. We did have trouble with filming the projected footage in terms of matching frame rate, shutter speed and frequency although we discovered for this particular shot it worked quite well, after some minor adjustments.

We shot a varied combination of shots with the two leads without the extras before calling the extras in. We were planning on using the smoke machine but decided it was impractical as we used it once and the room was smoked for about 30 minutes. Not to mention if any of the smoke escaped the room it could set of the Universities fire alarms. One of our best scenes shot with the extras was the dance scene in which we basically just told the witchy extras to dance their hearts out. It ended up being quite dynamic and worked well with all the girls wearing black with the black backdrop. I actually like how the girls seem to drop in and out of visibility as the move towards the back of the dance floor. When the leads Mo and Emma join in they stand out with the orange hair among all the darkness and it looks great.

In reflection this shoot was a success. Although In hindsight I think it would have been good if we got some tighter shots among the dance floor to quickly intercut that would make you feel like you were actually there, and not just a static wide shot. Furthermore, I feel like for the amount of time we didn’t actually shoot that much. There were lots of times were we were just standing around waiting, whether it was for makeup, cigarette breaks or because we simply weren’t organised as we could have been.

Over and out,

Luke