Second Day Filming

After our first day of filming, we collectively decided that a change of location was needed. We felt that our first location was good but only for some establishing shots and tracking shots, as the road wasn't busy or uneven. We also felt that the location didn't give a strong enough urban feeling, and so we decided to go out of our local area and into Woodford where we had researched a very urban looking housing estate that we felt would give our video the urban feel that would appeal to our intended audience and suit the songs tempo and feel.

Our plan for the shoot was to finish all establishing shots and work on the story of our character "Getting Nowhere". We had looked into a lot of music video's in the same genre as our song, and noticed that very little of the shots were still, and that the camera would move with the character and that many shots looked handheld. We chose to adopt this idea and only used handheld camera shots for our entire shoot, which gave us freedom to mix angles, shot lengths and focus. We tried also to frame our shots well, so that the shots were not boring and too central with no background.

I feel that the days shoot gave some very good usable footage, and now we have the majority of the establishing shots and have started good work on the outline of a story into our character. I do however feel that there will be one more shoot needed as we did not gather all of our footage we wanted. In our next shoot we plan to show the characters struggle with drugs and to get more footage on his attitudes and frustrations with his life in his area. We also want to film footage such as 360 degree pan of the character and traffic to edit and enhance for the video to change up location slightly and not make the video so one dimensional. Our second day of filming was much more successful than our first as we had a solid storyboard we could follow. However when on location we saw certain mise en scene that we felt would be good to film without it being included on the storyboard, including the cat, dump the knife bin and hand print on the wall, as well as rain dripping down a window.

By Tom Beal