PROGRESS: HOORAY!

On Tuesday 2nd November, myself and Abbie started planning what type of shots we were going to use to start filming our video. We decided that a shot with me, as I am now the actress in our video as we couldn't find anyone else, sitting on the window pane looking out the window, wishing she could be out there too. We experimented with pull focus on the new camera, and having the background out of focus, and slowly pulling it into focus makes a really cool effect, so we will probably use that in our video somewhere. We also looked at Lisa Mitchell's video for Clean White Love to gain inspiration for types of shots we'd like to use. We then uploaded the footage that we had taken and looked at it on iMovie and just looked at what worked and what didn't work.

On Wednesday 3rd November, we started filming properly. We got into the lesson and wrote a plan of what we wanted to film. We wrote what type of shots we wanted inside, and then what shots we wanted outside, and the specifics of where we wanted them filmed. We got the camera and tripod and went outside to film, we found two rows of trees that looked really awesome because they were symmetrical. Our teacher told us not to film complex bits yet, so we only filmed a little bit, the first verse, to see what it looked like. We then filmed me sing the entire song sat in a tree, so we can use bits and pieces from that shoot. The results of that shoot were actually really good, we might have to crop it so I'm in the frame more, but what we got was a really cool shot. Then I sang the entire song in front of the camera, it was a close up, and it was a shot similar to some of the Clean White Love video. These types of shots are useful as we are able to portray a significant amount of emotion through facial expression. It then started raining and it being a brand new camera, we didn't want to risk getting it wet, so we came back inside and uploaded our footage. We were happy with the progress that we had made in the filming aspect. We still had an hour spare after watching our footage back, and looking at what we could do with them whilst editing so we decided to set up shots to film inside, the window scene. It took about half an hour to set up the exact shot that we wanted, and it ended up being a low angle mid shot, which we then changed the focus to me, and the trees in the background were blurred. We didn't really like the lighting on this shot, so we got the natural light box and turned it on and it automatically made a massive difference to how it looked. Once everyone had left the room, we played the song, and filmed it from this perspective. I always sing when we're recording, because I feel that if I mime, that it will look really bad! Apparently, I looked out the window too much during this time, and we filmed it again with me just looking at and singing to the camera. In between filming these, we filmed some narrative shots of me just looking out of the window - again inspired by Clean White Love as Lisa Mitchell had some shots of her doing something, and the exact same shots of her doing the same thing but singing.

I'm really impressed with how much we got done today, next week I think that we are going to be refilming some of the shots we did today, as we accidentally left the camera on manual focus - oops! We will then probably film some more narrative shots as we have a lot of performance and then talk about what else we want in the video, and the ancillary tasks.