Main Shoot

A few days before my main shoot, i had to pitch my idea of my music video to the rest of the class and to my teacher. I will upload the pitch in another blog post as soon as possible!

Yesterday, i went out to shoot the main parts of the music video with my film crew. I had assigned roles before we got to the location. I had a co-director, person to play music for me in the background and some people running errands for me as part of the music video. I had a photographer of mine (Saffa Karim) who is a good friend of mine to come along and take some pictures for me so i can not only blog them but use some good pictures as part as my digipak later on. The video shoot went well, but did not go exactly according to plan. The two lights i had planned to use, one was not working so i called for another one and when that one arrived it broke. Myself and the crew fixed the light and started filming. I used a dolly, tripod and of course the camera. We then realised that the batteries we had where not strong enough so we went looking for some stronger batteries. The shoot went on for two hours and would have probably went on for more but the memory card on the camera was full. Today i watched over the footage and continued with my editing in final cut pro. I have now gotten into it and i am still filming around different locations to put in my main video to give the nostalgia feeling. We had some test shots in the beginning and experimented with the lighting and position of the camera many times during the video shoot. i took some close ups, mid shots and full body shots. also a single shot, 2 shot and 3 shot. I have print screened me editing today on the mac, one thing that i can say i have found about using final cut pro is the constant rendering of clips after i have finished putting an effect on them. Also, in editing i have put the "flashbacks" of scenes i want the target audience to feel a sense of nostalgia for in black and white and the rest of the video is in color. I have skipped the intro of the song straight into the actual verses. I have decided to work backwards and do the introduction of the song last. In terms of dressing, the male singer had stuck to what i told him to wear which was essentially the "Justin Bieber" look. He decided to play on the target audience by wearing a Disney channel jumper but he had chinos on and canvas shoes. The same with my character having the "gangster" image and the female singer looking like  she could be someone "influential". Whilst filming i had made sure that all the shots where relevant to the message i was trying to put across to my target audience. All 3 characters in the music video to me represented 3 different STEREOTYPICAL London youth of today. I did not do it to patronize but to go with the same idea that things such as Kidulthood and Shank went for.

Before you see the pictures i would like to thank the team for coming out and getting this video shoot to be a sucessful one:

Barbora
Saffa
Rimante
Kevin
Jerome
Robert
Cleve
Dolly
Mandi
Leyla

I will upload exampler pictures from the video shoot in my next blog.