Throughout this six-week course, our group was very efficient in terms of production. Knowing that our concept required a lot of material in terms of what would need to be shot in order to make up our backgrounds, we probably began producing content a little earlier than some of the other groups. We needed to experiment in order to see if what we had in mind was going to be successful and as a result we collectively agreed that this would be best tackled if we were each able to go away and capture a variety of material ourselves. Like shooting anything, our process of capturing background material featured a lot of hits and misses. We had some shots that were intended to be test shoots turning out so well that they were used in our final film and then we had others which had been anticipated to work much better but unfortunately flopped. The entire process, however, was pretty fun. Each class we were able to check in with one another and see what each member had managed to produce, complete with the usually entertaining stories of how they gone about both experimenting and filming the process.

Our fun background experiments were obviously a huge part of our concept and we were producing material from as early as week two, all the way up until week six. Filming the silhouette aspect of our work, however, required much more planning. Following three weeks of preparation and organisation we began to make our concept a reality when in week four of classes, production finally begun. Before reaching this point two major things we had had to determine had been:

1. How to go about using the green screen in order to achieve the best execution of our idea (taking into consideration things like the how to light the screen evenly to minimize issues keying out the green, how to light the artist, where to situate the artist in the frame etc.)
2. If we would be able successfully create our envisioned “silhouette head” effect through the footage we captured in the green screen room in postproduction (we knew this was indeed achievable, but we needed to experiment a little on Premiere with test footage to ensure that no issues arose)

Once we were confident with the technical aspects of our planned shoot we began liaising with the band in order to determine a time for our shoot to take place. We established due to time restrictions but also because of wanting continuity in our work (creative decision that multiple head switching could be distracting) that we would only be using the lead singer of the group. Our official shoot day with our artist was then scheduled for the Friday of week four (29/01). Arriving with plenty of time to set up the camera, lighting, staging etc. we were confident before our artist even arrived that things were set to run relatively smoothly. We realised as we began shooting that we needed to start thinking about things such as different ways in which he could enter and leave the frame, how he could vary his body movement and what sorts of props we could use in order to alter his appearance in the most visually effective way. During this process we made sure we monitored what it was we were capturing to ensure that we had ample footage and were also aware of what it was we had that seemed to work and what didn’t. Overall we all came away from this shoot earlier than we had anticipate and with plenty of material we were confident would work successfully with our idea.

We had many times during production where we questioned things such as whether we had enough background material, if we would have enough time to reshoot certain aspects after they didn’t go exactly to plan and just how exactly our variety of shots was actually going to come together. However, these were all moments that were to be expected and I feel as though as a result of us communicating and working together really well as a team we were able to minimise concerns and ultimately get through the production process very successfully.