Our shoot day was planned to be on 23rd of November. The day before, on 22nd, we came to the studio to build our set. We decided to start with the 3rd element, because it was one of the hardest to build, due to we had to hang the cloth down from the ceiling and attach lights to it. Also, for element 3 our lead singer had nude make-up and no lipstick, which was necessary for element 1, so placing element 3 first seemed like a sensible thing to do. We took a long white cloth, attached it to the light sticks, which we have folded in a form of triangle. Then we have attached it to the ceiling, so that the end of the cloth is just slightly on the floor. Underneath we placed a white blanked and more light sticks to hide the black floor. The cloth was no ironed and looked awful. I brought the iron and we were ironing the whole cloth for like an hour. After that, it looked much better and the white lights looked amazing. At 6 pm we were done.
On the 23rd of November I woke up feeling excited. I came to the studio at 8:30 and brought my camera to film behind the scenes. Everything was ready to start filming our 3rd element. We met our lead singer, she had her nude make-up done already. We gave her a white jump suit to wear and briefly explained her what she needs to do in that white cloth. When we started, the set looked a bit odd, because there was just a cloth in a form of cylinder, hanging from the ceiling and a girl standing inside. However, we had a TV connected to the main camera, so we could see how the shot actually looks. Lighting was brilliant, everything around the lead singer looked completely white, even thought the cloth was transparent and the walls of the studio at that stage were black.
We decided to switch the roles around during the shoot day, so that everyone can try different things. To be honest, we worked well as a group. we shared the tasks equally, didn't argue and was always ready to help each other, were enthusiastic and active. Mainly, I was on camera for element 2 - with the dancers and bulbs. I also was on playback a couple of times and helped to switch sets. When someone else from my group was directing or doing the camera word I filmed the behind the scenes video, which you can check in my other post. I loved being on camera, especially on the dance bit. It was interesting, trying to follow the dance by slightly moving the camera, to create panning or tilting effect.
To be honest, the shoot day went pretty well. We didn't have much problems, as we had a simple set and we've planned everything well beforehand. The only problem we had was with the first element, where we had red background and white couch. The couch was not quite white, but more of a milk colour. It also had a big hole right in the centre. We had to find a piece of cloth to cover it. We took the white one we used for element 3 and covered the whole sofa. It looked like it was haunted. So we covered only the back part, which didn't create a 'ghost sofa' effect, but covered the hole.
In my opinion, the most successful part of the shoot day was the third element, which we filmed first thing in the morning. It was pretty straightforward and simple idea, but it looked really good and unusual on camera. Filming our lead singer from above made her eyes to standout, so she looked even prettier, which is a good thing for a pop star. On the other hand, the second element with dancers didn't went as well as we thought it would. Firstly, the dance wasn't really thought-through and rehearsed well, which was obvious when we looked back to our footage after the shoot day. Also, as we were filming on the infinity roll, we couldn't really make wide shots, which would capture the whole body of the dancers, so we had to reframe their movements on set and make more re-takes, moving the camera up and down to film their dance at different levels. In that sense, I wish we did more rehearsals with our dancers. However, our lead singer was really good. She was confident and acted well.
I can't wait to start editing, I think we should have a lot of good footage to choose from. As we have one colour scheme for every element, the editing should be a straightforward and entertaining process as we can mix our elements together and put them in any order we like. I also think with the colour grading our music video would look even nicer. We didn't make any great changes during the shot day, so our video is pretty much the same as we planned it to be. This means that, our music video still fits in our marketing campaign and links to the album cover and the website. The main lesson I've learned about music videos is - rehears your dances more. If the dancers don't know what and how are they going to dance, the footage would look rubbish.
To sum up, I am happy with what we have done. The next stage is to start editing, which would bring us closer to finishing our music video.
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