MUSIC VIDEO - Production

Officially speaking, the production of the music video began on Sunday the 15th of January.

As mentioned in my previous reflective journal for pre-production, myself with Sam and Luke had booked T Chances' Small Stage room as the location to film the performance shots of Active Slaughter. We'd booked the room for Sunday the 15th of January, and had sent out all of the call sheets.

The day of filming came, and we all met at the venue at 11am. We went into the stage room and told the band members to put their instruments on the stage then to relax for a while whilst we set up our video equipment.

We had a camcorder and two DSLR's, a full size tripod and a handheld tripod, a standalone microphone recorder as well as a mini shotgun mic for the camcorder. We only had two SD Cards so we used the DSLR from college to take photos both outside and inside the venue to add to and extend our location recce.

When inside, we made sure the band set up on stage and I set up my Zoom H1 recorder microphone to record when the band performed the song to help sync up with camera footage in post production.

All in all, the band performed the song 5 times. We filmed them doing so from 2 different angles each time leaving us with 10 main clips afterwards; some shots static, some moving. Some continuous throughout the song, some switching angles throughout.

CRITICAL INCIDENT

We made a BIG mistake during the shoot which was to only play the beginning of the song over the PA then allow the band to continue playing it themselves, rather than playing the recorded version of the song throughout.

It was a mistake because we realised during editing that the band kept going in and out of time meaning we had to adjust clip speed a lot and also in two of the takes they missed out one section of the song leaving us with less footage to work with.

OVERALL Overall the shoot went very well. We worked with our storyboards as well as experimenting with various other camera angles and techniques, and taking creative ideas from the band members also as they watched the footage after each take.

The venue were wonderful about the whole thing, extremely supportive and helpful with the PA and they gave us free bread which was very nice.

We reviewed all of the footage after we'd wrapped the shoot and we found that the footage was all of very good quality, we got all of the angles and shots we wanted plus a lot of extra shots just to be safe. We had enough to edit with and overall we'd filmed the ban perform the song 5 times on 2 separate cameras, leaving us with 10 full length angles.

The band were very happy with the footage and so we went on to do the next shoot a few weeks after.

We brought two of the band members (JJ and Jeannie) into the college on a Friday so that we could film extra shots of them performing, so that we would have more footage for the edit.

We filmed plenty of shots using the JVC camera of the musicians, with JJ doing lip-syncing, Jeannie playing bass along with the song and then both of them singing along with the song into microphones. We spent about 2 hours from start to finish of filming and once we finished filming we immediately backed up our footage onto a computer, a hard drive and a spare SD card.