Sunday 18th November 2012

SUBJECT: First Day of Filming

We arrived at Shenfield station at 8.30am in order to allow time for the travel to London and get an early start on filming. Our group consisted of me, Lucy, Sophie, Daisy and our dancer for the video, Rhys. We all purchased a travel card which allowed us to travel to all London destinations. To our benefit, as there was a group of us, we received a discount and got the fare for a reasonable amount cheaper. This helped us out on financial issues about funding our music video on a tight budget. When we arrived at Liverpool street station, we made a stop at Starbucks for some morning refreshments and headed straight to our first location. This was positioned in front of a Graffiti wall within Brick lane and we chose to make this our first location due to the strong occurrence it will play in our music video. It was situated down a side road which worked to our advantage, as it minimised the public that swarms the streets of London for the Sunday market. We began by asking the residents of this street for permission to film and waited for their consent until we proceeded further. We laid out our props and costumes alongside setting up our cameras and tripods in preparation to filming. Often, this scene caused attention by bystanders walking past and at times, led to people trying to purchase our props and costumes due to them mistaking us for a market stall. After we were all set, Lucy who features as the main character for our music video got changed into her costume for this specific scene. This outfit was spontaneously picked on the day, as we thought that this will allow us to put together the best, abstract image to fit the location once seeing it in person. As a team, we chose an Aztec leotard and leather gillet to build a confident and sexual image through the use of voyeurism. Rhys got changed in to a grey vest, skinny jeans and a cameo jacket, which made him stand out from the background, and contributed to the military theme that matches the beat. We began by Lucy repeating the same verse several times to allow us to capture her lip syncing the words using different camera shots. This meant that when we look back on the footage, we can see a variety of different shots and choose the one that works best for our video. For our dancer Rhys, We played the song the whole way through and filmed him free styling to the beat. We included shots such as low and high angle, close ups and long shots. We also captured shots of Lucy and Rhys together, incorporating both her singing and Rhys dance moves to create an effective visual image.

Our next stop planned was to the embankment, where we were to film on a chosen skate park for their use of abstract wall art and a variety of heights for camera angles available. We decided that we would have enough footage placed in front of a graffiti wall for our video and therefore avoided this location to prevent our shots becoming too repetitive. Instead we took this opportunity to capture some quick shots of the general public and traffic so we can incorporate the buzzing atmosphere of London in to our music video. This will also provide another location in order to produce a more professional result. We then moved on from this location to the Trocodero mall in Piccadilly Circus. This is where we planned to film Rhys battling against the other men that would also be dancing there. This didnt go completely to plan, due to it being fairly busy which meant it was intimidating for Rhys to reach his full potential. Putting this aside, we still managed to achieve some effective shots of Rhys performing some single breakdancing tricks and sequences in front of the Graffiti painted wall. All of these will contribute to snippets of footage in different locations for our music video; to produce a more varied and interesting result. Whilst we were inside, Lucy took the opportunity to get changed into a different costume which will be needed for our final location. This was back to brick lane, situated in front of a LED lit screen broken up into square panels. We chose to return to this location at the end of our day at 5.30pm, as we thought that the darker natural light will highlight the lit up aspects of this location. We began filming other verses from the song which we hadnt included in the previous location and also captured more shots of Rhys dancing. A mid shot was the most common camera shot we used due to the limited space we had before background activities were exposed. As we was wrapping this final scene to a close, both cameras ran out of battery and therefore we were lucky to have bagged enough footage as intended for our first day of filming. Overall we thought this was an extremely successful day, as we achieved some effective results due to our well organised schedule and team work ethics. We all took turns in filming to make sure we all gained the best filming experience, and helped each other out with any issues and ideas we wanted to put forward in order to enhance the performance. If all goes to plan, we will not have to return to London to gather more footage and this will help us to stay within our limited financial budget. I believe we can take forward all the things that went well, so we can achieve the same success in our future days of filming.