Practice Shots

-On the 1st of November, our group went to take some test shots in the locations that we are hoping to use for our music video. This was to see whether the lighting and camera quality was suitable enough to make our video look as professional as we want it to. All of our shots will be filmed in daylight hours, so as long as the weather conditions are the same on the days we film, our footage will not be effected by lighting. We also will not have the problems with dark grainy footage like we had last year.

-The photographs of the train track and train are examples of how we want to use a high angled shot in our video. This will be used in the fast editing at the start of the music video.


-I also took some images of one group member walking away from the camera on a path that we want to use in the video. We decided that these images looked very effective, so filming in this location would work really well.

-The autumn colours of the trees and fallen leaves gave us an idea to create a theme around this for our video and maybe even incorporate it into our ancillary tasks as well. We decided to have our artist wearing wintery clothing and also tried out an idea of kicking leaves to create a more interesting element within our video, rather than just having walking along a path.

-The autumn leaves and rural setting gave us another idea that we thought we could use as part of our digipack design. The shot of someone in our group standing by a tree links in the theme of autumn and would make all the things we produce cohesive. It is simple and minimilistic and similar to the promotional advert for Diana Vickers' new single. This is just a rough idea, we would use proper costume and choose a more suitable location and pose for the real thing.

-During the storyboarding of our music video, we decided to have a shot that was repeated for a certain part of the song that was also repeated. For this, we wanted an image of our artist singing to camera at the train station. As this is quite impractical to carry out, we thought of an alternative option whilst practicing our shots. Near to the path we want to use, is a wall that when filmed correctly looks as though it could be at the train station, without the hassle of getting to the station with all our equipment and the actress. I filmed one of the members in my group lip synching to the song against the wall and it appeared to work well. With correct editing, this would be a successful comprimise.

-We also took some rough video footage to see whether or not the shots

we were planning on paper would actually work in real life. We recorded a shot of someone walking towards the camera and it slowly zooming out as they got nearer, to see how effective it was. We did not have the real actress or a tripod, so the footage is not an accurate representation of how it will look and some of the camera work is shaky, be we got a vague idea.

-This day of shooting was a very helpful thing for us to do, as we began to develop a clearer idea of what we wanted our video to look like and decided on some important locations and made other decisions about themes and styling for the actress. By doing this as a planned activity before we got allocated the correct equipment, we could avoid losing time on filming days and we know have a clear idea of how filming will go.