Filming Diary: Studio

8th November 2016 and 14th November 2016:

Filming for the studio scenes was split into two days as we weren’t completely satisfied with what we had at the end of the first day.

On the first day, Devyani, Jack and I all came to my house to film. We had previously practiced setting up the kitchen (see vlog) so knew everything would look okay and knew roughly how long it would take. We put the backdrop up first and held it in place using a stall and the bin, we borrowed a box light from my cousin so we placed that on another stall so It was at the right height to capture all the shots, we also put the tripod and camera up next to the lighting so we had enough space on the ‘stage’ area. We began by filming mine and Jack’s scenes which were us fighting. These went really well as we had planned previously what we wanted to get. One of our ideas was to have a fight with gold paint. We did this however had to change it slighting so it wasn’t so violent otherwise the paint would have gone all over the backdrop and this didn’t belong to us. So instead the fight scene was more like we were caressing each other rather than hitting but it still turned out well and links into the scenes well. A lot of the other shots included Jack being quite dominating towards me by grabbing me and my character being quite submissive as we made Jack tower over me. Additionally we wanted to make it clear that the relationship is coming to an end by me snatching my hand away from him when he’s trying to hold it, by me pushing him off when he’s hugging me and by me walking off as if it was over completely. We also ended it by my character having a gold tear run down her face, which represents the values coming out of her. This worked really well and really links everything together and is a good place to end the fighting scenes

 

After finishing those scenes we moved on to the lip-syncing so we changed up my makeup slightly by having black and gold lips as this would be a zoomed in shot. We found it looked more natural if I actually sang rather than just mimed so that’s what I did.

Once we were happy with that we moved onto Devyani’s shots, her scenes involved a lot of props and we had a lot of problems with these. We wanted to put glitter into a balloon and blown it up so that when she pops it the glitter all falls out. This didn’t work as whenever we went to pump air into the balloon the glitter just got blown out and went all over the floor so we soon realised we weren’t able to do this. Secondly we had bought some large confetti poppers that we wanted to film popping so we could slow motion the footage. The packaging said to only pop these outside so we tried this first and it went everywhere so we wasn’t sure if we wanted to use the other one inside or not. We chose to do it as we really wanted these shots. I decided to hold the camera rather than use the tripod because I wanted to get all of Devyani in as well as some spacing around her to capture the confetti. However I failed to remember the massive Bang sound the popper makes when twisted and as the popper went off I jumped so didn’t manage to get any of It in shot. Leaving just a huge pile of mess and no footage to put in our video. We then continued with other shots of Devyani but overall just felt very disappointed at everything that had got wrong and didn’t feel like these were what we imagined when we planned her scenes. Therefore we decided to keep the scenes of me and jack and the lip-syncing but meet up again to get the rest of Devyani’s shots. So we cleaned up the mess we had made.

About a week later we met up again but this time we went to Devyani’s house to set up the studio in her bedroom. We did this because we didn’t want to be on a time limit and if we had used my kitchen we would have only had around 2 hours which wasn’t ideal. The backdrop fit really well in Devyani’s bedroom and we set the lighting and camera up so they lit everything nicely. The shots also went really well, we focused on getting a lot more than we needed to be safe, we also scrapped using the confetti popper and balloon ideas and focused on just using the confetti to throw and used a hair dryer to blow it over Devyani. Towards the end of filming we had an idea that we would like some warmer lighting in a gold or orange tone but didn’t know how to achieve this. I then spotted an orange Sainsbury’s bag on the floor and thought it might work if we put this over the lighting. We did this and it worked really well and helped to break up the studio shots so they’re not too repetitive. By the end of this filming day we felt so happy that we had started those bits again and felt that they were much more of the level that we wanted and expected. This was also our last day of filming apart from filming a few sparklers about a week later so we were pleased with how it went.