MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE GEAR GIRLS.

filming 5

We've just filmed the 1940s scene, set in a bomb shelter. We filmed inside a crawl space inside a roof, replicating the cramped conditions of bomb shelters in WWII. We plan to use an external shot of a bomb shelter that I currently have in my back garden in order to set the scene, and then use what we shot today as the interior.

It was a fairly successful shoot: we had lots of fun and filming by candlelight gave a really nice ambient look to our footage. However, we did have to be extremely careful as we were filming inside a wooden roof and lighting and relighting candles many times. Luckily, the smoke alarm was all the way downstairs so we didn't set it off!

As always, we tried to replicate authentic costumes of the time. I wore my hair in plaits with a floral dress, knee high grey socks and a cream cardigan. We thought this was quite iconic of children at the time of the 1940s. To compliment this, we also had an authentic gas mask box and old teddy bear, although we aren't sure how well these have shown up on film.

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*Insert Date* - Update.

We have now successfully finished our 1940s scene! We filmed in my back garden outside - unfortunately, the timing was horrible as we had to film in the snow, and the dress I was wearing was not very warm at all. The shoot - luckily - was a quick one and I am proud of the footage I got.

For this scene I had to run in on the left side of the frame (as I had run out the right side of the previous shot) and go into the bomb shelter. After a couple of takes, we also decided to start experimenting with shaking the tripod to create the effect a bomb is hitting. I think this looked really good on camera, and we are looking forward to editing it. 

Editing

Even though we haven't fully finished our shoot yet, we decided to start editing our footage in our Media Studies lessons in order to get our music video completed as soon as possible and move our focus to our ancillary tasks.

For the very beginning of our video, we had planned quite a complicated edit. The concept of the beginning scenes was to show the closeness of our two main characters' relationship, and we had filmed it in preparation for a montage. However, as this part of the narrative was particularly key for making our video make sense, we wanted to highlight it even further. We decided to do this by presenting the scenes as moving photographs, with the video playing inside a picture frame.

The first thing we had to do to do this was find a suitable frame. We chose a Polaroid photo as the frame as we felt this was the best way we could show the moving photo concept, as normal photographs do not generally have borders. As we could not just add a frame onto the clip on Final Cut Express, we decided to download a picture and layer the two items.

We did this by placing the Polaroid image on one track, and the moving image clip on the track above it. This meant that when you viewed the project, the clip would be ordered in front of the frame, which was idea. These were both placed above a photo of a wooden table top, which would serve as our background. When the clip was covered by another Polaroid, it would eventually finish and the previous Polaroid would be blank: we didn't want this, so we also decided to repeat the clip just to give off the impression it was still playing in the background.

We then needed to crop and rotate the clip in order to make it fit the Polaroid. We did this by double clicking the clip, and going into the 'Motion' tab which gave us the option to crop. Although we could also rotate from there, we preferred doing it by enabling the 'Image+Wireframe' setting and using the options on the wireframe to rotate it.

We had to do this several times: once for each clip, and then for each Polaroid as well. As we wanted to give off the impression that they were stacking up, this meant we had to layer each new Polaroid and relating clip on top of the existing ones. In the end we ended up with 31 tracks, and 15 Polaroids.

filming 4

today we did our 1920's shoot which took us around an hour overall. we unfortunatley faced some difficulties beforehand whilst deciding and organising where to shoot as we had a couple of different houses we were able to shoot at but our timetables didn't fit in with when the owners were free for us to film. Eventually after a lot of organising and planning we were able to find a house nearby to our school in which we were able to film in. It was a 1920's style house with a very suitable deco for us to film. we took the filming equipment to the house and met our extras and all arrived together. we spent about 15 minutes setting up all of the equipment, moving things around in the room so there was nothing connoting modern day and getting changed and doing hair and makeup. Beforehand we also went to a nearby supermarket and chose a variety of cakes that we brought to have on the table as it was a 1920's petting party. we added up the amount and split it between the 4 of us so that it was fair and shows we all contributed. We cut up the cakes and placed them around the table on plates and we also had a 1920's silverware dining set that we used.

overall the shoot went really well and we made sure we got all of the shots that we needed. we filmed everyone sitting at the table talking and eating the cakes as well as people playing the piano and dancing. we filmed as quick as we could as we were using somebody elses house and they could only stay at home for an hour as they had to leave so we had to stick to a tight time schedule to enable us to get all the footage needed. everyone had fun whilst filming and it wasn't stressful as we planned and organised it very well beforehand.

SWOT

 Strengths of our idea

 - allows us to experiment with various different editing techniques
- enables us to film in a variety of different places
 - it allows us to experiment with different costume ideas from various different eras paying a lot of attention to details
- we can play around with intertextuality and a post modern pastiche of images
- it allows us to combine both performance and narrative
- using mass cast to create a comfortable environment for filming


Weaknesses of our idea

- stress when looking for appropriate venues and costumes
- as we are using a lot of different locations it is difficult to get a lot of filming completed in a day therefore we have had to spread it out over a longer period of time.
- as we need to spend a lot of time filming it was difficult trying to get together all of the extras at a time when they were all free and when we did manage to get them all together it was only for a limited amount of time.

Opportunities our idea produces

- experiment with new editing techniques that we didn't get the chance to use last year
- to work with a lot of people as we need extra actors and a mass cast
- to learn more about the production side of our music video
- to film in a wider range of locations

Threats to our idea

- involves relying on a lot of other people because of our mass cast
- due to the complicated nature of our video, if one element goes wrong it can jeopardise the rest of our filming
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