Shooting Diaries

We took many different days to shoot our music video, this depended on the location.

17/01/11 - In our first day of filming we focused on taking the street shots and the outside the home shots. For this we used the outside of my house, we fiddled with the tripod to make sure that the road didnt look as steep as my house is on a hill. Once all adjusted we got filming. I filmed the shot of the house standing alone, for this I looked at different angles that I could take this shot from to find out which one looked best. I feel that this shooting went okay and we have many different takes to choose from in the editing stages.

18/01/11 - My group stayed at mine which meant that we could get filming straight away today. We went to Seaford beach and the nearby park to take the swing shots. The weather was really holding out for us! When taking these swing shots we didnt have the music with us which made it really hard for me to mime the words with the right rythm and speed. When on the beach I took the shot of the cliffs, I used Alex and Jenny in these shots to be people walking along the beach. This gave a busier vibe as though it was a nice warm sunny day. Even though it was freezing! I took quite a few takes for this shot getting it to flow well when tilting the camera. However, on this day I wore different clothes as we had not establish which clothes I was going to be wearing before hand. This meant that we would have to reshoot yesterdays shoot with the clothes I was wearing on this day. We did not look at the footage until we got back as we didn't want to waste the battery life that we had left on it. We then discovered that there was a spot on the camera lens which the sun was attracted to, causing a bright light in the middle of the camera. This means that we are going to have to reshoot these two days! However, a lesson learnt!

24/01/11 - For this shoot we went to eastbourne and stayed the night at Alexs. This day we took the wood shots, another freezing day but lovely sunny weather! I took the shoots of Alex and Jenny dancing in their pyjamas. Obviously these are the shots that I can take as I am not in the music video at this time. We also took the field shots of me on this day. This time we had a portable iPod docking station and the song on the iPod, this meant that I could mime to the song as it was playing in the background. This made this run a lot quicker and smoother than the previous days of filming. I had the chance to use the camera a lot more on this day and capture quite a few shots. I redid these shots until I thought they were good enough as I want the shots that I captured to look really good, I felt as though I did what I intended and the shots came out really well when playing them back.


25/01/11 - On this day we went to Eastbourne beach and pier. For these shots we had to take a guitar with us as well, this was the part of the music video where we have Ellie Goulding playing one of the instruments that she is known for playing. We had another really nice sunny day which was very lucky! Taking the music with us again was really helpful and we will do this for all other filming days because it makes the filming process a lot quicker then if we went without as we learnt from the first two days. Again, I had a couple of shots, the sky and the guitar shots which I was able to take as I didn't have to be in these shots. I experimented a little bit with what looked best; zooming in and out, tilting, panning and focusing in and out.


01/01/11 - This day we went to see Dan to let him know how we were getting on after shooting on location for the past couple of Tuesdays. We then went into Lewes to shoot our town shots, this involved me in all of these shots. We were able to play them back as the battery would last for the whole time we needed it which meant that we could discuss and decide whether to retake the shot or not. I think this shoot was quite successful as we managed to get the shots done in a short space of time. There were quite a lot of maintenance work going on in the town so we had to deal with less space than planned so this was not in the shots that we were taking.

15/02/11 - This day Jenny and Alex stayed round my house, this was the day that we reshot our first two days as they both went wrong. This day we did the shots of the outside of our house and had problems with the lighting as the sun was shining through the window. This involved us adjusting the contrast on the video camera for us to get the right lighting. We played back after recording to make sure that everything was looking okay, after last time we were very careful. This was very successful and was very quick to do as we had already done it once before.

16/02/11 - This day we went to reshot the park scenes, the beach scenes and shoot the graveyard scenes. This was a lot easier when having the iPod dock to mime to and to get the right rythm. We were really lucky with the day as we have been all the days that we have shot stuff. We have been getting quicker and quicker and shooting these scenes as we understand how to work the camera more and have all our notes with us to follow which really helped.

14/03/11 - I had Alex and Jenny round for the night to shoot our final 3 shots. This was something that needed to be done in the evening and we had to have an extra person for these shots. These are the bedtime shots and we used Jack Codling for this. We made a bed on the floor to be able to get high angle shots of the bed to show the position of the people in the bed better. I felt that this was a really good idea, this meant that we could still use the tripod and the shots would still be nice and sturdy. I felt that these shots went well and were really quick to do when having the shooting scprit in front of us.

I felt that the shooting script meant that we knew which shots we were doing each time we went out on location to film, this made it a lot easier and gave us the advantage of knowing what happens in each shot and not making anything up when we were there as this would have wasted time. I felt that all the filming went really well and we all had the chance to film. I think the shots I did were thought out really well and I made sure that I did them to the best quality I could.