SECOND SHOOT - BAND SCENE

On Tuesday 19th November, Ellie, Max and I planned to film our band scene to the song Californication by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers after school, in order to gain access to the school's gym. The gym is empty and rather large enabling us to experiment with lighting, whilst having an enormous amount of space to place our props wherever we deemed appropriate. Thankfully, upon realising we needed three band members and only having three of us in the group, with at least one of us on the camera's, a friend, Huw Carey, stepped up to be our drummer for the evening. Max, Huw and I were the members of the band, with Max playing the bass whilst singing, Huw on the drums and I played the guitar. Ellie was in charge of the camera work and used different angles and shot types to create unique, professional and sophisticated shots of each of the band members and the band as a whole together. 

This shot taken from my iPhone 5S was simply to show the basic set up of what the framework was going to consist of. Typically, the drum set sits in the middle of the shot whilst the two guitarists (Max and I) stand at either side. Due to the specific lighting needed we had to use guidelines along the floor (sticky tape) in order to understand where we had to stand to be in shot continuously throughout the shoot. This was difficult, as we wanted to make the most out of the immense amount of space we had on offer, however, we needed to make sure we remained mostly in the shot for the majority of time. 

This was the completed set up of the drum set where Huw would sit throughout the shoot. 

Here is an enthusiastic picture showing Max the bassist pulling off a pose whilst we all began to set up the lighting and smoke machine. We previously didn't realise we had access to a smoke machine, however, our teacher managed to get hold of one for us and we began testing it out early on and put it on a specific timer in order for the smoke to come out without the need for anyone to press the button. This also allowed us to set the smoke to release itself at specific points within the song, which allowed for great effects especially during the chorus of the song, where the beat and tempo is extremely heavy, loud and fast paced. The smoke against the darkness and specific lighting also created a very professional image. 

Here I simply took a picture of Ellie and her camera that we were using to film parts of the music video with. It is a Nikon camera. 

Here is an image of the smoke machine we used during the music video shoot of the band. It was really heavy, and quite large so we had to be careful during filming that it didn't come into shot, although we wanted all of the smoke in its timer on display. The smoke machine took 30 minutes to heat up before it worked completely. 

Here is simply an image of one of the two tripods we used to mount our cameras. 

Here is an image of the Go-Pro we used in order to get close up shots of the instruments and the finger movements on the guitars. We only used this Go-Pro for the guitars. It was really useful because you could link the Go-Pro up to an iPhone and see the imagery on the iPhone whilst filming so you knew what the quality and positioning was like. This was simple and easy to do and therefore only took a few minutes to get around 30 seconds of video recorded. We held the Go-Pro in place because if we used the 'sticky mount' it would have been hard to move the Go-Pro from guitar to guitar. 

Here is simply an image of a close up of the Go-Pro held in place on Max's bass. 

Overall, the shoot went extremely well, and although we were time pressured due to a late start because of the lack of availability of the school gym until 4pm, we got a lot of brilliant work done, with these shots we have taken providing us with near a minutes worth of screen time for our music video. We will review what we have filmed on Thursday 20th November and begin to start editing the shots so that they are ready to be incorporated in the music video, when new scenes are filmed.