We’re nearly finished with our music video, and yet it dawned on me the other day that I haven’t done my set report yet!

To be honest, the day didn’t get off to a great start. The night before we discovered that rain was predicted for the next morning, and so the shoot had to be pushed back to later in the day. We also had a bit of difficulty getting to the location: some of our actors couldn’t find any parking so we were almost two hours late from the get-go.

We were under the pump, but we pulled together. Jordan was our cinematographer, and he had looked at the photos of the Gardens we’d taken the week before and organised a shot list. He knew exactly where he wanted to film each scene, so we set up a base camp in one area and got started.

We went in reverse order, so we started with the group scenes and went backwards. Though we had taken a while to get started, Jordan’s organisation meant that we could move along at a good pace. The actors wore their own costumes, aside from a wig that we had bought, some ‘Elvis hair’ cleverly styled by Jenny and the balloons, also brought by Jenny.

As we moved along with the scenes, we reduced our number of actors so the job got easier as the day progressed. Blair had provided a speaker so we were able to sync certain scenes to the audio of the track as necessary.

We filmed at various different locations in the Gardens, and it proved to be a very workable location. The weather held out, with the sky just the right mix of sun and cloud and the rain forecast for later in the evening holding off. We also had no trouble with bystanders; although the mild, sunny day had brought a lot of visitors to the gardens, our locations were such that this wasn’t an issue (either they weren’t in shot, or were so far in the background that it didn’t make a difference).

A few times in the day we changed our ‘unit base’, but mostly we were able to just take the equipment and actors we needed to each location to save time and effort. One of the great advantages of the Gardens is that there are such varied locations in such a small space, meaning we could get an aesthetically diverse range of shots without having to move too much.

Although we’d had to rely on volunteering friends for our actors, we had in most cases picked people specifically who had experience on camera so while they were perhaps not Oscar-worthy performances, they were at least manageable.

Once we had filmed all of the narrative shots we took some time to film Abby singing along to the track. We picked a green, grassy location that would look nice on the Canon DSLR lens and got Abby to sing the song through. Unfortunately, as we were running short on time we could only do it through once. However, considering how late we had started we were pleased to have gotten through all the necessary narrative shots.

Overall, although we had a few mishaps to start off with, the day ran relatively smoothly and we got a range of useable footage to work with in the edit.

Below are some pictures we took while horsing around. It’s amazing how with the right camera and a pretty location even silly shots look wonderful!