This shoot day was our practice for the actual shoot. We decided to run the whole shot list using a stand in for the Artist. We were nervous about our technical aspects like syncing up the projector to the camera and quite rightly so. It took us about 2 hours to get everything working.

We kept getting a strobing effect on our cameras despite using the exact settings that were working on our previous shoot day. The AV loans gave us a different model projector which we thought may have been the problem so we swapped that about an hour and a half into the shoot when we realised it was a different model. We were then missing a MAC cable HD to USB. Jono ran off to get one from Office works which seemed to help for a while but then the projector went on standby and when we turned it back on we had the same problems with the rainbow strobing effect.

We worked on some different lighting set ups that made the subject look really nice but later on we realised that any extra lights in the space, on the subject or on the background softened the projections and dampened the effect.

The footage we gathered from this shoot wasn’t the aesthetic we had imaged so we made a few choices for the final day. 1. We were going to go back to using limited lighting and not worry too much if her face was darkened in parts by the projection. 2. We used gel lights red/purple and green as the backlighting rather than a dido (no front lighting at all apart from the projection itself) and 3. we decided to go hand held rather than static shots. Because of the song, the energy, the simplicity of our concept the static shots were no longer holding. The footage needed movement variance and more options for cut aways. We also decided to use another camera on the actual shoot day so we had two cameras shooting the artist. We needed another angle for all verses and chorus’ and because we decided to scrap the bridge with the fight scene so the whole clip was featuring Ali performing the song in one way or another.

I was really fortunate to be attacked by glitter by these two girls while I was waiting for my group to arrive. They have a makeup business and were doing free glitter for people at the RMIT Orientation day. They glittered me up and then we got talking about what they do. We had other makeup artists in mind but I liked their energy (and glitter) so I asked if they were available to shoot on Monday the 1st (our first planned shoot day). And amazingly one of them was and she turned out to be our make up artist on the day. Super Cute! Also the glitter that they put on me, turned out beautifully in the footage as I was acting as a stand in for Ali during the rehearsal. It caught the light really well so we ended up incorporating it into Ali’s make up on the day. We were really nervous after this test day because when we looked at the footage the following day it wasn’t as good as we thought it would be and didn’t have the impact we were hoping for. This is why we made the changes I just mentioned because it was seriously lacking impact and power. For a concept that relies on a simple idea executed well, it just wasn’t enough despite just looking at raw takes without edits. I’m really glad we made the changes we did and the choice to shoot on a Red camera that would be less likely to give us technical problems on the day. We were really apprehensive coming to the actual shoot day but that quickly turned into excitement and we ended up having a great shoot with Ali.