Construction Post 1: Days 1-3 of our music video production

Our shoot days 1-3 priorities:

• Beauty shots with full white lighting and a white backdrop
• Chorus dance shots in most backdrops
• Film our filler shots such as the balloon and confetti shots
• Film me, Gift and Monica doing our individual verses in our personal backdrops (strobes etc.) and spotlight setup
• Review footage to identify anything that needs to be re-filmed and alter our schedule accordingly if needed.

Monday
Day 1 of shooting went really well. We were very excited and headed straight into lighting, makeup then shooting. Despite coming into the studio on time, we still got slightly behind schedule as we did not realise how long it took to do our makeup and set-up. For example for the lighting we had to manual maneuver the lights in order to have them in the right angle and with the right flood level.

What we finished filming that day:

• Silhouette shots against red background
• Individual shots white background XCU
• Spotlight shots of me and monica
• group dance white background

I think our spotlight shots turned out well as it looked like neon jungle's but we made it our own by covering half the lamp with a red filter in order to create a cool gradient. The lamp was quite heavy to use so I had to move it really slowly to achieve a smooth pan for Monica's shots. Me and her had a lot of frees together so we filmed each other's shots a lot of the time.

The video below includes my thoughts on how the first day of shooting went.

Tuesday

What we got done that day:

• Monica's individual verse pink lighting
• Panel background set-up - dancing in pairs
• Floor lamps pink lights set-up - group dance
• Monica's black background + strobe lighting effect

I loved how Monica's individual scene turned out. We kind of free styled this shot as the blackout and dimmed white light we planned to use just created a very old-fashioned vibe we didn't like. In the end we used a blackout setting and white strobes which lit in rhythm to the beat of the music we put on through speakers. This achieved a very jumpy, club-like atmosphere which worked very well with her rap verse. This combined with her pink backdrop shots contrasted nicely.


We also shot our panel background setup which looked really good with pink and orange lights lighting it up from behind. Our only issue was that the size of that backdrop was too small to fit all four of us dancing at the same time. We improvised and danced in pairs, planning to edit it together which worked out much better in the end.




Wednesday
We ended up not having much to shoot on Wednesday as we had to reschedule some scenes as shown below on the original version of our shootboard and then the edited version.
However we started shooting I'd say what was our most difficult scene that day which was my scene with Mario. However the boys weren't scheduled for shooting that day but we felt to try this setup out as we knew it would be complicated. It required setting up laser lights and dimmed floor lamps. This scene took a while to master. The white lights had to be bright enough for my face to be lit but not too bright that it drowned out the colours of the lasers. First we tried one lamp then we set up a second lamp which shone a narrow beam of light onto my face. This worked out better.