Filming of The Band Sequence

Today we filmed the band sequence. For this we had to use a drama room in our school so that we could get a plain black background. By using this room we were also able to use the advanced lighting in that room. This allowed us to play around with the lighting in our video so that we could create a particular lighting effect for the filming of the band sequence. Since there are many lights to use, we had to make sure that we had the lighting pretty much even so that we can minimise the shadows in any of the shots. Since we filming in a variety of different angles, we had to keep altering the lighting so that in every shot the shadows were limited. In some shots though we used particular type of lighting such as a spotlight.

For this scene, we only used a spotlight to get this effect. This would make the background dark and Tom very bright, however we wanted a straight on shot, but due to the camera needing to be in front there was always a shadow on Tom, to change this we moved as close to the spotlight as possible so that the camera and the tripod would fit under this.

Tom lip synced the whole song through with this camera angle so we can use it whenever we want throughout the music video. We also made sure that the spotlight wasn't too bright otherwise the light would glare off of Tom and into the camera so we would not be able to see him probably.

For some of the lip syncing parts, we also used a monopod to get moving shots of the wolf singing. By using a monopod we could get much more smooth shots rather than just using the handheld method. We also used the monopod to do instrument closes ups on the guitars. We would sync this with the music in the editing stage in a way to make it seem like the guitarist is actually playing.

We changed the lighting for these shots because the cameraman would be moving around we tried to prevent an shadows of the cameraman being shown on the singers or band members. We had a prop throughout these sequences which was a mic, this was supplied so that the singer could look as if he was performing in the band sequence.

We run into a few problems while filming the band sequence, the main one was the the tripod that we had we not tall enough for some of the shot angles that we wanted to carry out, so we had to improvise by using things in the room such as tables and chairs. We make sure that the camera was still level in the shots so that it wasn't slightly canted. Another problem that we had is that there was some technical difficulties with the lights and the lights kept on switching off halfway through the shots, so we had to film quickly so that we could get everything we had planned to film completed so that it's ready to edit.