Filming Update

We're currently almost finished with our filming for our music video. 

Filming has proved more challenging than initially thought; well not the filming as such, but more so the time management. Finding time when everyone is available for filming, with the correct weather conditions has proved difficult. This is primarily due to all our locations being off-site and so we couldn't just leave school for an hour or so and return, we have to commit to whole afternoons. Connie, Lucy and George also all have weekend jobs which removed these as potential filming days, leaving us with Wednesday afternoons and Tuesday afternoons every two weeks; with these days being weather dependent. 

In order to tackle these set backs we kept our filming schedule adaptable. For example, we'd keep an eye on the weather up to the last minute and try to maximize our time with good weather. If George wasn't available in the preferable weather conditions (due to other commitments) we'd shoot Connies individual scenes and below you can see some examples of how we used social media to communicate and arrange this, overcoming the issue. 

We also decided that for the beach scenes we'd film at Meadfoot, not Dawlish Warren purely due to time constraints, we thought Meadfoot would be more time effective.

As predicted, it has also been challenging filming shots which involve tracking with the camera, as we lack the equipment, and so this had to be done with handheld shots, which ran the risk of an unsteady shot. 

This was apparent when filming the car scenes. Shooting within the car has been fine, but for outside shots it was challenging to film the moving car whilst keeping a steady shot. To tackle this we made the decision to make the car travel slower (around 5mph) in order for me to successfully track with the car and maintain a steady shot. The plan is to then see how this footage looks when editing, and see if the car looks like it's going unrealistically slow, and if so, look into increasing the speed of shot so it looks like the car is travelling at a faster speed. 

We also had to deal with this when filming the lip syncing shots which involved me tracking backwards whilst Connie walked towards the camera, so that it'd show her movement, whilst having her position in the frame remain constant. 
Like with the car scenes, we made Connie walk slower than she perhaps normally would to allow me to track back slower (which in turn would make the camera steadier). I also utilized the camera stand, by placing the handle on my shoulder and holding the base with one hand it steadied the camera and so as a result our lip syncing shots have been fairly smooth.

Now all we have to film is Connie walking on a country track/field and also some more car shots and we will have finished filming.