Cultural Filming Event – The Hub- Day 1

Thursday 20th October.

We were approached to help film the african cultural event going on at The Hub, I felt this would be a great beginning to my proffessional experience so I voltuneered to be apart of filming and editing the final product.

We arrived within plenty of time before the event started, this gave us enough time to check out where each event would be taking place and begin setting up the equipment. We decided to only have one tripod as most of the shots needed to be tight and close meaning more of a hand held postion with the cameras.

Sophie Lees was postioned as director, this meant she was incharge of sorting out a plan for the filming. We were spilt into two teams :

James Root, Josh Kelly, Oli Rees,

Seb Shaw, Andrew Veremu, Myself.

These were the main two production crew’s although we did have help from Chris Hammond, Lynn Kapinga and Giselle and Janet and Lynn on Photography also.

It was a great oppurtunity to film a project outside of university (slightly)  because It made me feel more of a professional. Although we werent being paid for it, We were still filming an event for a client. You learn more from production if you just go out and do it!

The Event consisted of a variety of different performances throughout the evening, from street dance to African dance, to a chinese song and a poem.

 

These a few photographs taken by the lovely Janet Awomuti, displaying the different peformances that went on throughout the evening.

I think it was a very worthy project, It was good practice to begin my proffesional experience. I learnt that I have developed many skills from last year which I can now push through and challenge within the second year. Skills included : Camera operating, offering a range of different camera angles and shots. I have the ability to set up a equipment quickly and correctly and can function the basics of a camera. Many of these skills were learnt and developed during the first year, however doing a project such as this one is a great eye opener to how much you have learnt and can develop further.

From doing this project I feel I have developed more confidence in myself, in which I can now present a much more professional style to my work. I am quickly learning and adapting to working at a higher level and bringing more of a higher quality to my productions.

Video can be found here :

http://vimeo.com/41294535

The “4 Week Project”

So the past few weeks have been focused and centred on this four week project, working within groups made up of people in our APT groups. We were given a brief which outlined that we could make  literally anything we wanted. 

Alexander Blaikie

Nicholas Pace

Scott Cowley

Nigel Bromfield

Jessica Wilkinson

Sophie Jane Lees

Research

Once we were placed into groups, Our first issue was discussing each of our ideas and deciding which project we were going to follow through production.  We decided to go with an experimental music video which played with time and motion. Once we were clear with our idea, we began doing research into music videos, focusing on the style and camera angles and shots.

T4 Advert.

Bleed it out – Linkin Park.

Best of you – Foo Fighters.

Theses Videos are my among my favourite, out of the many we watched and anaylised. The T4 Advert came to mind when we first discussed the idea of experimenting with using the reversal movement. We liked the idea of using reversal within our music video, it can be seen as quite contempoary but also still quite a new style.

There are many different examples and all represent a different style but all incorporate the idea of reversal and experimental which is what we wanted to portray in our project,

 

Snow Patrol – Take back the city

As a research continued we looked into many videos, which helped to get our creative juices going. We also mentioned about using stock motion within in the shots but as pre production got going. We realised that using our time effectively would mean focusing on the camera angles and compostion of the video itself.

End Love – Ok Go

Here it goes – Ok Go.

Going away from music videos now, We also looked into reverse shots, we found some videos that helped us to began visualises the shots we wanted and how they would fit into the narrative for the music video.

2 Guys 600 pillow cases.

When we came across this video we were so excited, this was the exact idea we wanted to experiment with and it looked so much fun.

Development

So once we had a rough idea of what we wanted from researching into exisiting music videos, if helped us begin to visualise what  we could do. We were limitless. From this we then worked on creating a shot list and a narrative. We needed to get moving with production as we wanted to really challenge ourselves and push ourselves by working with time and motion.

From this we tried to plan our shots, produce a storyboard etc. This would help when it came to filming as it would give us a structure to work with and help to build the narrative up.

We decided to allocate all of wednesday to get most of the shots filmed. We made a location list, this helped up to organise our day effiently as we were all on a tight schedule in terms of filming and editing the video together. During our research we found that music videos, often had a variety of different shots therfore we wanted to apply this same format to our music video. This meant we needed a lot of different shots, in different locations and to fit in with the narrative we came up with to fit the song lyrics.

… To be continued.