Filming - The first day

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The first day of filming was shot at Amy’s house. The appropriate scenes were filmed mostly with ease, and it was a productive day. The first shot we decided to film was the master shot. Amy and Becky was seated on the bed in Amy’s bedroom, with a curtain swooping either side of them. The room was quite dimly lit, and so the curtains were drawn open and the lights turned on. The bulbs were white, which was handy because it meant that there wouldn’t be an ugly ‘indoor’ glow to the final cut.

This was to be the opening singing shot, and involved the two of them lip-syncing the song the whole way through. This actually got done very quickly. Amy and Becky had learnt the words to the song early on, and so were comfortable with singing it the whole way through. The camera was originally positioned directly in front of them, so as to show them both symmetrical. This looked good in my opinion, and so we filmed the whole song through a couple of times in this position. The more takes we had of each shot, the easier it would be to edit, so we tried to vary the set up a little each time, and give a different attitude to the actors performance.

The dynamism of a music video is in our eyes the most important part, so as well as standard shots at textbook angles, we also experiments with camera techniques such as whip-panning and Dutch tilt. We also filmed a close up of each singer’s face so that they could be used appropriately in the music video to add a bit of variety.

We discovered that whenever any red was in shot, the picture on the camera would flash. We could not sort this problem out, so in each shot we had to try and keep as much of the wall out as possible. This was very tricky. As well as the flashing problem, when we played the tape back on the camera after each shot, a stream of black bars would appear on the screen every so often, and we hope this is only the camera and that they won’t shot up after we’ve imported the video.

We then filmed a few shots in the living room. The style of the room suited the music video nicely, with classy black and dark hues. This matched the ‘rock chick’ feel, and so we experimented with this room as much as possible. We filmed Amy and Becky sitting and moving into different positions around the room whilst lip syncing to the song. Again, this will come in very handy when we need to draw on a range of dynamic shots during editing.

Marianna also pointed out that as the living room door was fitted with glass panes, we could fix a shot of the girls through one of them, as it worked very well as a frame and would add nicely to the visuals. We filmed different variations of this and it went very well for an off the cuff idea. However the black bars on-screen still persisted.

As well as the scenes in which lip-syncing is need, we also filmed shots that are relevant to the revenge story line. First we filmed what was needed for the laxative scene in the kitchen and the living room. We took several shots of Amy and Becky laughing holding a box of laxatives, and then me drinking tea in disgust. To top it off we film shots from several angles of me running down-stairs and making a dash for the bathroom. I think that these shots will work well for invisible editing.

The computer also played a part in the day’s filming. We turned the lights off in the room so the chiara scuro lighting had a big impact. We were wondering how it would be best to film the information on the screen, as sometimes when filming screens with the school’s camera, grey bars flash up across it. To tackle this, we downloaded a free screen recorder from ‘cam studio’ and set it to record different areas around the screen. This worked to a degree, but we have yet to export and capture the video to use in our production. We need to do a bit of a crash course in editing this kind of video format before taking it on.

We’ll capture the video during our next media lesson.