Filming Diary-Day 4: 26th November

Some photos of the studio where we filmed

Yesterday we filmed the bulk of the video, the performance aspect in a studio. We had many doubts going into filming because our performers left Thornbury later than we had liked to get into Bristol. This made our group very stressed as we had booked the studio from 6-9 and we were weary of traffic accidents and other problems. Although we were anxious that our performers would not get there on time or be demotivated once they actually got there to film. We were also worried that if they had arrived late, we would not have filmed all the footage we needed because they needed to leave at 8:45 in order to get the bus home. However, we all arrived 25 minutes earlier than expected which allowed us to set up the mic, drums and all the audio we needed including the aux and linking them to the speakers etc. This 25 minutes also allowed us to go through the rhythm with the drummer and the lyrics with the singer, although both made an effort to learn them before the time of filming.
The filming went really well as we had planned in a lot of detail what we wanted to do and our group went through this numerous times before we got to the studio because we were worried we would run out of time. We had created a shot list with all the shots, camera angles and times we needed to film at. This allowed us to film pretty much for the full 2 hours 30 minutes as opposed to being unorganized and having to discuss with the group the next shots we wanted. However, we did have a few mistakes on our shot list with timings which held us back a couple on minutes which drained the battery even more.
The filming went better than expected and Pete and Josh took the job very seriously, which we wanted. They also wore appropriate clothing which linked with the conventions of the genre nicely and gave it an indie look and feel. As Josh is a confident performer, he could have a camera in his face and still perform to a high standard. This enabled us to film fully within the 3 hours and still have a lot of time left over. Another benefit we saw from utilizing a confident performer is that he knew how to get into character fast which saved us a lot of time and made the overall look of the clips look professional. Josh also studies film studies so he suggested some shots we could film to bulk out our video as we thought that some of the shots we were filming would become really repetitive when we started editing the sequence together.
We also used an experienced drummer who has been learning for the last 8 years.This was crucial for ours to look good because he knew when and what to hit and made the video look really professional in terms of the drumming. We were contemplating to not use Pete as we didn't think it would be worth it but we were all happy we decided to use him because he added more depth too the performance  and made it look much better.