Filming

To the left is the checklist we used to make sure we had all the right equipment on the day of filming and to make sure we didn't lose anything whilst filming.


The filming went smoothly and a warden from the church was available to help us with lighting the church and setting up the equipment. Upon arriving at the church, we began setting up the equipment in the corner of the church with the most space and windows, allowing the most light into the area where we were going to film. Our priority for the first two hours was getting shots of the band as a whole, and the lead singer. This was because Dan, our lead singer needed to leave early, and after he had left we could focus on individual instruments and their close ups.

Throughout the filming, Elliot was controlling the lighting, Alfie was making sure the right shots were being filmed and was also playing the violin, and I was filming the video. Before we began the filming, we set up the instruments in their correct places, showed the performers the animatic we had made, and set up the song on a music player so that the band members could keep in time with the music.

Once we began filming, we took a variety of close up shots of the lead singer along with some medium close ups. We also took longshots of him and the band as a whole so that we were not missing the lead singer in any shots after he left. We took some short clips, and also allowed the band to play through the song twice whilst is continually filmed the band. This gave us a variety of shots over a small space of time and we didn't need to keep repeating certain lines.

After the lead singer left we focus on the instruments in the video. This was an easy aspect of filming as the chords and beats for each instrument were the same throughout the video so could be repeated easily unlike the singing. We took long clips of each intrument from different angles, for instance, with the drums we filmed the cymbal crashes, over the shoulder of the drummer, and close ups of his hands and feet.

As the light through the church windows became dimmer we needed to rely more upon our own lighting. The warden was happy to let us use more powerful lightbulbs and these helped us get a nice glow on instruments such as the cello and violin. We knew from the day of filming that we would need to schedule another day to record the lead singer.