Planning: Evaluation of film shoot (23rd,24th,29th Oct)

On our first day of filming, our shot locations were the park and Brigg town. Arriving at 12 and ending at 4. The date was Monday the 23rd of October. We were very successful throughout the day as we achieved many of our key shots for 2/4 locations we plan on shooting at.

On our plan, we wanted to film all the shots in Brigg town before heading over to the park and filming there. Unfortunately, when planning we didn’t take into consideration the towns heavy population during half term. As there are 2 secondary schools and 2 primary schools based in Brigg, many younger children and teenagers stood the risk of walking into shot. This could have caused issues regarding safety as we would have needed parental consent. As we did not have enough time or control to ask if people would be okay with standing out of the shot while we filmed, we decided upon moving locations to the park, only getting half of the shots we planned on taking. This came as a learning curve to us as we now know to take into consideration the heavy population that comes with a half term break. Looking back at it we should have arrived and filmed earlier as most younger children and teenagers are not around town in the morning.

When filming in the park there was no one around, making it a perfect time to film. We took many of the shots we planned on taking on another day of filming. During the filming we came up with more ideas that could have worked in the music video. Shooting these ideas gave us more options to work with. In the park we stumbled upon one key issue, a group of teenagers proceeded to make noise making it very difficult to focus when shooting. A lot of the shots we attempted to take during filming were spoiled by this group of teens. Because of this we decided to move locations again to another area in Brigg town. This wasn’t quite what we wanted to do but there was nothing else we could have done. Fortunately, the area we filmed in Brigg after filming at the park was perfect, barely anyone was around and we were able to get some great shots linking to the lyrics "dead in this town".

On Tuesday the 24th of October, we filmed at the location Kenza's House between the times 1-3pm. This was a great time of day to film at this location as the weather and lighting was ideal for filming inside a house in Doncaster. This shoot was very successful, and all planned shots were perfectly executed as planned in the script breakdown. The private location meant that our actor’s confidence was raised drastically. He has been very easy to work with and been fully co-operative throughout. The single problem we had when filming at Kenza's House was the shot of Connor as he stood in an a particular area of the location. The lighting was different in the kitchen and this meant that the darkening weather affected the shot considerably. We determined that it wasn’t necessarily a vital shot, and felt that moving it to another location would not have caused an issue. If the shot taken within the location had been necessary, we could have rescheduled it on an alternative day when the weather was better.

We needed a very quiet period in a town location, so chose a Sunday afternoon to film the town shots.  We knew Brigg would be less populated on a Sunday, rather than Monday. We reviewed the weather  forecast and identified the afternoon of Sunday 20th October as a perfect time of day to film. However, the weather forecast was wrong, at 2 o’clock, it began to pour with rain. The footage we had collected prior to the downfall was very good. However, after 2pm, filming became impossible and so the shoot was rescheduled for 5th of November at 12pm.

I am personally very happy with the progress we made as a team when filming in all locations. We are both really happy with how the video is starting to turn out and are glad we are a great working team.
Throughout this filming we have learnt to understand and take into consideration how populated an area could be depending on the day, time, weather and school holiday dates. Communicating with the team is essential. We had to be sure all the required people could attend the shoots and that everyone knew what was expected for each shot.  
We also learned that shots which pull back to a high angle, and low tracking shots can be very difficult to do without the right technology.