Account of Shoot Day

Thursday, 4th November 2011


We started the day by filming the performance element of our video, as we had to wait until it was beginning to get dark to shoot our narrative as it was outside (in the end, because of weather conditions, we had to change the narrative and shoot indoors). We had a bit of a slow start getting the filming going, because on arrival at the shoot at 9:00am, we discovered two of our band members were not there, one was missing and the other had pulled out last minute. We managed to track down our guitarist, and because our DJ was crucial to the song, we had to ditch our bass player and make him the DJ. Whilst this was very irritating and stressful to have to deal with, I feel that it actually made our band look more authentic, as our original bassist, Will, looked more suited to his role as DJ. Also, in the Prodigy, there are only 3 members.

Here is a picture of our set: it was made to look like a warehouse, with chains, sheets of metal and tyres in which blue and red lights were placed, sitting in front of the DJ decks. The lead singer was swinging high up from a rope, and we used strobe lights and smoke to give a punky, raw effect.

When we started the filming process, we gave our cast a brief about what we wanted them to do, and how we wanted them to act. This mainly applied to Holly, our singer, who we wanted to have a lot of attitude and be quite aggressive towards the camera, which she did brilliantly, which was good considering she found sitting in the rope very uncomfortable! We then all assigned ourselves roles within the group, one person doing playback, one on the camera, one writing down the different shot types we were doing and keeping a diary of our progress and one directing. We all took turns in doing these roles. 

We started off by doing our shots of the band, wide and medium ones, and then focused on our close ups of Holly. We filmed from different angles, and put her in different positions on the rope. We started off with her sitting in it, but this got very uncomfortable for her, so we tried her standing for a bit, and then switched to filming on the dolly, which we set a ladder up next to so Holly could stand on the ladder and hold on to the rope, giving the illusion that she was swinging from the rope, because she was higher up than the rest of the band. Here are some of the shot types we took of her:

After this, we then filmed the other band members close ups. The whole process of filming our band members took a lot longer than we anticipated, mainly because we kept having to reposition holly. overall though, it went quite smoothly and our band, particularly the DJ, worked well.

When we finished this, after having a break for lunch, we discussed what our next move would be. Although it did not actually rain that day, it had the night before which meant that the ground in the woods where we wanted to film was too wet to put the electrical equipment down on. Therefore, we had to brainstorm ideas about what to do. It was decided that we didn't want to reschedule for another shoot day, because we had already obtained permission for our cast in the woods to miss lessons, and that it could always rain again which would mean we would be left with just the narrative part of our video. We decided we could bring the extras into the same setting as the band, but use them still as a narrative. We decided that Abbi would still be our 'innocent' figure, and that the strange creatures we were going to have preying on her in the woods, would be doing the same but in the enclosed space of the set, which actually made the whole thing creepier because she had nowhere to run to or hide. 

Once this was decided, we then had the task of finding people to be extras, which was very hectic! Luckily, a teacher said we could use his class, and we rounded up some others so we had a good amount of people. I then briefed them in how they needed to act and behave, and we gave them the big bag of costumes and masks to choose from. The costumes were mainly simple, cloaks and capes, but some people had their faces painted and the animal masked worked very well with the creepy look. We decided we would keep Holly in the scene, and she would play a 'goddess-like figure', who had supposedly summoned the creatures. 

We filmed a huge variety of shots, mainly from the dolly with Holly in the foreground and below her the creatures trying to claw at Abbi. We also filmed form inside the circle of creatures, using a handheld point of view shot to give a realistic, scary feel. We also filmed from the edge of the circle, handheld again, so we could capture Abbi's reaction. 

After this, we decided to do some shots of the extras. One extra, Elle, stood in the middle of the creatures, who were lying around her feet, and she bent backwards. We had the camera on a tripod, close to Elle, and then filmed her coming up from her bend very quickly. We then had the extras creeping up from the ground into the camera shot. I am not sure how well this worked, but hopefully it was very effective. Below are some pictures of our extras.

Overall, I feel the shoot went very well. We all participated equally in the filming process, and had input into how the shots looked. Considering we had to make some seriously un-prepared decisions, I think it went very well, and was actually very pleased with what we had achieved. I took some short film clips on my mobile, and although they aren't very high quality, they give a feel as to how our finished product might look. Our group worked well together, and we all managed too keep relatively stress-free!