PRODUCTION LOG #3

 

Dinner Party Scene

10th December 2022

Today Clementine and I finished off our filming, by shooting the dining room scene. Alongside filming with Lucy and Vedaant, we also needed at least 3 extras to give the impression of a dinner party, hosted by our two main characters. We invited some of our friends, and also used Clementine's brother to act as an additional guest. Once again, we used the curtains to block out some light, however the lighting was slightly different to last week, which is something we will have to correct in post-production. 

This week we used a gimbal, so make our tracking shots more stable. Our final shot of the video is a continuous tracking shot, which made the gimbal especially important. It took some time to balance the equipment, but I used the DJI Ronan app to conduct a balance test and make sure that everything was set up properly, to minimize the risk of damaging anything. It was quite heavy after holding it for a while, so we attempted to film everything efficiently. It took a while to get the final tracking shot right, especially as we had to get the timing right so that the song reached its end as Lucy sat down at the table and lip-synced the last few lines. It took a few tries, but eventually we filmed a successful shot.

Clip taken from our rough cut

Another challenge we encountered, was avoiding the extras taking up too much of the frame as Lucy sat down in the final shot (shown above). When practicing the shot, we found that the extra sitting across from Lucy got in the way as the camera was following her sitting down. To avoid his head being in the shot, we had to coordinate his exit from the scene. As we filmed walking out of the kitchen, the extra was in frame so he had to be sitting at the table, however as soon as I rounded the edge of the table I gave a signal and he quickly moved out the way along with his chair to clear the way for the rest of the shot. This took a few attempts so that we didn't catch him leaving the table, but it worked out well in the end.

Bathroom Scene

After reflecting on our footage from the week before, Clementine and I had decided we wanted to film some extra shots in the bathroom as we hadn't perfected the shot we wanted and it was out of focus. We used the same red blanket to block out the light from the window, and were more mindful to not catch the our additional light in the reflection of the mirror. Instead of placing the small light on a surface, which we found had been too bright in the mirror last week, I crouched on the floor and held it at an angle so it would not be in the shot. Having practiced last week, our shots were timed much better, and in focus. This week the footage was much better so it is what we will use in the music video.

Today concluded our filming for the music video. Now that we have collected enough footage to start editing, we will drop it into the editing software we are using, Final Cut Pro. We plan to create a rough cut which we will use to gather feedback, before creating a final product. This will help us gain a better idea of how we want to structure the video, before focusing on correcting smaller issues. From there we can also gather if we need to reshoot any material, or gather more coverage.