Shoot Day 1 - 28/10/14 - London

We began shooting as early as possible, utilising half term to make early progress.
For these first two shoot days, the focus was getting most of our narrative footage. On the 28th we met at Leicester Square, London to capture 'relationship' shots of Roza and her (ex) boyfriend for the video, as well as iconic shots to strengthen the British identity of our artist, as it is part of her niche/USP.


I took the initiative to arrive an hour early in order  to scout nearby locations such as Oxford Street, China Town, Soho Square This meant the group could have a good idea of how the natural lighting and density of people might look prior to shooting. These factors can be very unpredictable, so we found this useful.


Some of the photographs I took while scouting before the shoot, which I sent to the group through Whatsapp



Road closures, accidents and crime/investigation were also potential issues, but fortunately this was not an issue for us when carrying out our shots. I confirmed the availability of our locations and we proceeded as soon as everyone arrived. Strong sunlight that day provided opportunity for attractive shots, but was a challenge because shooting in late Autumn meant full daylight would last a small time frame of just a few precious hours. Another issue we took into account was the heavy shadows that the natural light would cast on tall buildings, so we had to wait for the right moments and use the right angles to obtain good lighting, which would be far less of an issue in a more open environment like a park or field.

Above is an initial shoot board for the Tuesday (London) shoot. Much of it changed more closely to the shoot, during Whatsapp conversations earlier in the holiday, as too much time travelling would have meant too little left to shoot.




Here is a map I created of the locations we actually ended up shooting at, all within around half an hour by walking or public transport. This demonstrates the more 'on the spot' thinking as we shot the more Northwesterly locations and then the South East of the nearby areas, before coming back up to Trafalgar square to finish and get the train home from there. We knew that if we planned locations too strictly in London, it would be to our detriment if an area was unavailable, so we planned the rough areas we wanted to shoot at, all within a reasonable radius of where we met.





At the end of the shoot, we recorded ourselves talking about the day. I speak about the many sources of light at the Trafalgar Square setting where one of our relationship shots was taken, which applied to all of central London, especially at night




The light sensitivity of the HF G30 made it difficult to shoot because when the lights changed, which many did, the footage can change significantly as the camera tried to adjust. We did not gain permission to use the more effective Canon 5D Mark II DSLR camera due to us shooting outside the school so the footage quality varied in lighting quality - we had to take into consideration that something might look good in our eyesight but this does not always translate onto camera.




One of my personal favourite shots that did not make it to the final music video was shot on London Bridge with the London eye in the background. The lighting was effective in terms of contrast but we felt the high levels of grain could compromise the quality of the video. Above you can see our attempts at rectifying this, however in the end we left the shot out as we decided to have a consistent performance bed of the fire projection, 'wet' infinity white and blue jacket and rose shots, and that it would not make perfect sense to use London for both performance and narrative.