Shoot on 11/11 - Performance Scenes

This was the first shoot we did for our performance scenes; due to scheduling issues only the two DJs were available for filming on this day, so we had to film without Georgie in the scene. This scene definitely took a lot longer to set up than we had initially anticipated. We particularly had difficulty with getting the lighting exactly how we wanted it to look. Although we had already chosen a lighting set up for this scene and saved in on the lighting desk, we still had complications, we wanted the two DJs to be in blue light, and for Georgie in the centre of the scene to be in pink light. Although Georgie was not there we still needed for her lights to to be on so that the scene would look the same for when she is there. We had to manually move all of the lights individually so they were hitting the right spots in the scene, 

Trying to find a nice camera angle for a close up shot of Gavin,

It was particularly difficult to keep the boys under blue light without making them too dark. We had to spotlight both Gavin and Eugene but we definitely had problems with ensuring that they were light enough to see them clearly on camera. In the end we had to use back lights to light the two boys as we could not get enough light from the lights at the front.

Chris, our technician helping us put up some props.

The props set up for the performance scene.

For this scene we asked our media technician to help us with hanging up our cards; we used 'invisible wire' to hang the cards from the lighting rigs above the studio floor. We chose to hang the cards at different heights to fill the space more, and create an interesting background. We had to spotlight each of the cards individually without lighting the black backdrop behind them, so that it would stay as black as possible on screen, and not show the curtain.

Although we came across many issues on this shoot day during the setting up stage, we were able to create a good filming environment once our actors arrived and we were ready to begin filming. We played the music really loudly and asked our actors to put energy into their performance as if they were real DJs. They co operated with us really well, and we even tried using a glide cam to get some more interesting shots of the two of them.

After looking back at our footage from that day I think that the shots we got whilst using the glide cam were slightly disappointing as it was so difficult to control and none of us had used one before, but we managed to get several usable shots. Another thing that we noticed was that sometimes our actors were not moving to the beat of our song because we were playing other songs on the speakers.