Filming Josh

Plan:
We felt we were now ready to film our singer/songwriter Josh Embury performing his song. We wanted the location of this performance to be perfect and realized we couldn’t use the location of a rough cut as it was to urban. Here are so of our favourite benches that we found:




After lots of research into the rural locations of benchs we found our perfesct bench on Brandon Hill in Bristol that highly contrasted the city.
Here is me showing what it would look like for the performance:


Filming:
Karin was unable to attend the filming session as she had to go to work but me and Mattie were both able to attend. We both knew what our aims of the day were and what needed to be achieved before they set off, this enabled us to get on with the filming straight away. We sat Josh on the bench we had chosen with his guitar then we set up the ipod and speakers for him to play along to, making sure they were as close as possible without being in shot, helping josh keep in time to the song. We filmed the whole performance from three different angles ,like in the rough cut, but we filmed each angle multiple times ensuring we definitely had good footage.

Photographs:
We also decided to take some photographs of Josh to help us begin thinking about what we could possibly do for our auxillary tasks. These looked really good when we looked at them on the computer, so with a little bit of editing on Photoshop we were able to create some powerfull images to represent the artist and the song.

Editing our rough cut

Importing Footage:

We imported all our footage for the rough cut into imovie to begin the editing. To stop our shots from Letter-boxing we changed imovie’s preference’s as letter-boxing is not what we want for our video and it saves a lot of time due to letter-boxing possibly taking hours, also we did not feel that our end product needed to be letter-boxed.

Editing:

Once we had imported both the rough cut footage and song we started cutting the Footage into Individual Shots/takes then into short clips to match the phrases within the song. Using these key pauses and breaks within the melody will help us match our cuts and transitions to the music and help us keep in time.

We decided to use one of our establishing shots over Bristol as our opening. This was to help set the city scene; also it shows the contrast between the urban city and the rural bench he is sitting. To keep the contrast of locations we will keep cutting back to different shots of the city between some of the phrases of music.

Final Rough Cut:

We left some gaps within our rough cut, this was to due to us not being able to film all the shots that we would have liked due to weather and we wanted to show we knew where we would be put them. This gave an accurate overview of the timings of when and where our cuts and the shots would be.

Filming the Rough cut

Location:
We decided to film the performance element of the music video with our actor (Josh) sat on a bench secluded from city life to symbolise the isolation of where he is compared to within the city. We took a trip to The Lake-grounds in Portishead and found on Battery Point there were lots of benches with potential for us to use. We wanted a bench that didn't have anything around that would distract the viewer’s attention from the performance.

Shooting:
For the rough cut I stepped in to perform the song in his place. This arrangement was made because due to British weather we couldn't film at the time of day we had planned to film there for Josh was not available to film the rough cut.
Equipment List:
1 Video Camera
2 Tripod
3 Still Camera
4 Ipod and Speakers
5 Guitar (for performance)
We used 3 different shots to film our rough cut these were:
Straight on medium close up, side on close up of guitar and low angle.

So I could stay in time to the song we played the song on the speakers, also this would help us to know where in the song we are when editing. I had one run through to get used to the song, after this we got straight to recording. Whilst I was recording Mattie and Karin explained to anyone who walked by what was happening and made sure they didn’t get in shot.

Film Planning

This was our original storyboard of ideas









We filmed some test shots of the city to decide on where our best locations could be. Along with all the equipment for filming we also took a stills camera to take pictures of our favourite locations so we could produce a neat and accurate story board. We found a wide variety of places we could have used to portray the city in and around Bristol but we eventually narrowed our shots down to:
• Outside 'The Hippodrome' - Traffic lights and traffic shot
• On top of the NCP Car Park - establishing
• Brandon Hill - establishing
• Cabot Circus - general city shots
We imported all our footage into iMovie and started experimenting with a range of effects, we also tested what the shots would look like with parts of the song. We discovered that the traffic shots looked good in black and white and also made quicker with an added effect of ghost trails to give the blur of busy traffic.