Filming Diary: First day filming: 18th November

On Saturday 18th of November, we went to film our first sequence of the music video. We filmed the very beginning and the very end of the video. We knew exactly what we needed to film as we had a storyboard with all our shots on.On Saturday, we filmed the part where an older man listens to the song in his car whilst on a journey and starts reminiscing his teenage years. This was quite a fast segment to film because we didn't have that much to film with Jim, Tom's dad.

There were many positives we took away from our first day filming; as it was our first time filming with a proper camera, we needed to get used to all the settings and filming with limited space. We found it fairly easy to get used to which allowed us more time filming, instead of setting up. We weren't in a time limit to film although it was raining and some of our shots were outside so we wanted to get it done fast so that our equipment wouldn't get wet and damaged, as it wasn't our camera and gear. Another positive was that our actor, Tom's Dad , took it very seriously. This was crucial as some of the shots were awkward and quite embarrassing, e.g. nodding his head back and forth for 5 seconds. Tom's dad was very good and his acting allowed us to complete the start and end of the video. We also filmed extra shots whilst we were there which were not on the storyboard. This enables our group to work with the footage and make the best looking video. I think it is important to film more than one shot for some scenes as when it comes to editing, we can edit the videos together to involve more editing techniques such as match on action, which would hopefully get our marks up.

On the other hand, there were some negatives and improvements we could act on. Firstly, for our scenes when we were driving, the roads we drove on were very bumpy leading to shaky footage. This could have been prevented through the usage of a stabilizer which smooths out the footage in terms of bumps and movements generally. Another negative was that it was raining. This didn't really affect us as we filmed in chronological order although we could not film different parts again that much. For instance, if we had filmed the very first shot of Tom's dad walking out the door and then got to the end of filming with the last shot we did which was Jim, Tom's dad, nodding his head. If we had then gone to film the start again after finding a fault in the footage etc, then it would have looked very bad as the lighting and mise en scene would have been different.

Overall, we had a very successful filming session and we got everything we wanted to film done with extra parts as well. However, next time we film, we will continue to make the continuity look perfect and we will also film some shots in the future again to make sure the footage is of the best quality.