Dance - Shoot day

Shoot day was a long and tiring day as i had been awake all night trying to make sure everything was ok as well as emailing schedules due to the room we was in being needed by someone else at specific time and generally just sorting the final plans.  After getting 4 hours sleep we got up right and early to transport the equipment across farnham ready to set up at 9am when the room was available. 

As we were all tired i told the group id rather us take our time pushing the equipment to uni in trolleys as we didn't have a car, so a we didnt break anything and b we didnt stress ourself out to early. This then set us 30 minitues behind but it was ok as we planned a long set up time to make up for this. However when we started setting up a couple of the light stands wouldn't work correctly, the cables we needed for the samurai blade wasn't in the kit, the bar doors wouldnt work on one of the lights which ment we had to keep going back and forth to stores to try and fix this. 

We eventually got the lighting set up how i wanted, how ever  as the room was a lot small than the ones we had practised in we couldn't get the right depth of felid to hide the light meaning the light was really visible, so i had to think on my feet and change it slightly and add the lenses flares and details we would loose because of this back in post. Then of course because nothing can be easy the bulbs blew . Eventually we got everything sorted and ready to go but we were an hour and half behind. With us having to be out of the room by 1 we were very pressed for time. To make up for this time as i was the most confident out of the group i told them not to worry and just focus on there rolls. Kat was on continuity, molly i told to watch the dance and movements and make sure they were spot on all of the time and Lauren was 1st ad. 

As tom and shaid had not been involved in the process of making the film they were just here to be camera man and gaffer, i had to be very clear about what i wanted and how the shot was going to go. I set up the camera to the right settings whilst they set up the glide cam . I found it very hard to direct a camera crew as im not very good at articulating what i want to do, especially with the flowing moving shots we had. I ended up walking them through the shots using my arm or a rolled up shooting schedule to guide them through the shoots.  I really enjoyed working with tom and shahid as they were very efficient and hard working, which because i had a lot of things to focus on made the process a lot smoother. 

As the dance had lot of little movements and details we needed to capture the dance was broken down into 4 phase then each one of these broken it blocks of 8 so we could film each block + a bit before/ after to get the detail we wanted as fast was we could. I found it was easier to do it this was as they moved lot and very fast if we tried to film the whole thing in sets like close up it would have become a lot complicated with tom having to move around them really fast.  There were some shots where we tried to film it as a whole how ever they just went out of frame or moved away to fast that it didn't look good. 

eventually we caught up with time and only became 30 minutes behind. Ideally we could have done with 2 days to make this video as there were so many sections and things to do however i feel like we all worked well as a group to get it done to the best we could. 

This shoot out of all the ones i have done so far has been the only one i have enjoyed, i feel thats mainly due to the people we were with as we were all on the same page and wanted to have fun at the same time.   I feel there are some things that could have gone better but i will cover that int he evaluation.