Filming in Recording Studio

We used the music recording studio in college to record footage of Courtney singing into a microphone whilst wearing a dress in the studio. We decided to film in monochrome to add variety to the video as the effect adds appeal when the colours of the room are quite bland. The room was completely soundproofed and has all the equipment you would expect in a professional studio. So courtney wore the headphones and sang into a microphone which was held in a round microphone stand.
This effect is one of the conventions, as Paramore use monochrome when recording footage of playing in a recording studio in their 'Careful' video. As well as You Me At Six using it in their 'The Consequence' video.
We had a problem from the start that thw memory card was only 2GB which couldnt hold much footage as it was high resolution and the battery was running low, but still managed to film the full song 3 times. The first time was close up direct approach which wasnt a very good angle as well as she wasnt wearing the headphones, so this was deleted to give space for more footage. Then we filmed her singing the full song into the microphone again, using a close up angle but filming from her right hand side at a diagonal. Also we filmed the song again close up and directly infront on her but this time using a high angle which made the shadows and tones which monochrome brings out look alot better. I also filmed a long shot from behind her so that you could also see the rest of the studio, which was effective and hope to use it as one of the clips. A shot which didnt work was one i tried to do through the window of the door to the room in the studio which has all the sound desks in, because I wanted to zoom into the TV which had CCTV footage of the room she was singing in, and this would have given a really nice effect and footage from an angle which we otherwise wouldnt be able to get. But my screen just went white when trying to film the TV screen.

Filming in Summer House in the afternoon

This went a lot better than the first time we filmed, because the lighting was right. But we had picked up a camera which had only 20minutes of battery left, and this meant we could only film the shots we needed and not much else. We still tried to get as many different angles as possible, turning the camera on and off to save battery. We were filming in Apley wood for the first time the morning afterwards, and didnt have enough time to go and get a new camera from college, so this was the point when we decided to film the Apley footage with my DSLR camera as we had no other choice, and also ound that this was of a much higher quality.

Filming in Summer House in the evening

We left college at 4 o'clock in the hope of getting to the location in Lilleshall at sunset but not too dark to film. But as it gets dark so quickly at this time of year we didn't get there and start filming in time, so it was too dark. We tried using a torch to shine on me whilst i ran through the door, but it still wasn't enough and we'd have continuity issues and couldn't see the effect of it being a dusty room. Also the green screen footage we'd got earlier in the day wouldn't fit, because the lighting wouldn't be the same. But this did give me chance to introduce this location to the person I'm working with and she agreed that it was the right location for our video.

Green Screen Filming

We very nearly were not able to get this done, as we set up the green screen in a room and i put the bold makeup i needed to wear on, then we had to leave the room as it was being used for an exam. So we disabled and re assembled the green screen in another room and i got changed into my costume before the fire alarm went off. By the time we got in it was lunch, but we stayed in through lunch to film. The idea of using the green screen is to add into the footage we recorded later in the day in a summer house, with the view of filming over my shoulder the corner of the room, then putting the green screen footage in so it looked like there was 2 of me on the screen.

Filming instruments

The girl i am working with got her friend Josh who plays guitar to learn the guitar parts to the song, and we got him to play it over the top of playing the music (to make sure that the tempo was right) and used the camera to film different angles and zoom in and out. He didn't want his face to be in it and as we hadn't got a band we used close ups and extreme cuts as well and zoom in to get around this. They then got a youtube clip up of someone playing the drums to monster, and even though neither of them played drums, Josh learned some of the music and we filmed him playing it (again not including his face and putting on a cardigan to try and block out the fact that it was the same person who played guitar).

Filming the Dance choreography

We originally booked out the bridge dance studio to film but had to be moved to the dance hall which is a lot bigger and has sports markings on the floor, but tried to use angle which meant this wouldn't make any different. The dance was to the chorus of Monster, as this could be edited so that certain movements could be shown for the narrative after I've ran through the wood and to show emotion to the piece. We tried different angles of the room (being careful not to get the camera in the shots as we were filming into mirrors) including: