Construction Post 1: Days 1-3 of Music Video Shoot

As our group had a variety of different backdrops and 6 days to shoot the whole video, we decided to split up each shooting day based on the set-ups that we could use for that day. Here are our list of backdrops:

Our Main Priorities for Days 1-3:

• Get all of our beauty shots done (in front of white backdrop)
• Film Monica, Gift and Angela in front of their individual backdrops
• Get all our filler shots eg. popping balloon etc
• Film our chorus dance shot in front of the white, black,red and panelled backgrounds
• Review footage after every shoot day and identify anything that needs to be re-filmed and allocate time for that in our schedule.

Day 1 - Monday 23rd November 2015

Extract from Monday's shoot schedule

Picture of Gift and I positioning the lights

Our call time for this shoot day was 7am, we all managed to arrive on time, however, we still didn't manage to start shooting on time as we underestimated how much time setting up the lights was going to take. Even though we had pre-set our lighting colour and intensity at the lighting desk, the positioning of the lights had been moved so we had to move them all back to how we wanted them, which took an incredibly long time and since we didn't schedule for it, we ended up starting filming an hour later than planned.

However, once we got started, we picked up the pace and managed to make up for lost time. We planned to film set-ups 1,2,4 and 9 today. We successfully managed to film in 1,2 and 9 with no major problems. Once we reached set up 4, however, there was a slight problem. In order to achieve a black background, we had to have a complete blackout in the studio but this meant that it was so difficult to actually see our faces even with the flashing white strobes.

When we were experimenting with the strobes and figuring out ways to make this set up work, I suggested that we try the strobes on an individual person with the black background. We decided on Monica because her verse is a rap verse and the jumpy effect that the strobes created on the black background worked really well with this part of the song, as shown in the video on the left.

We also filmed the individual spotlight shots and they came out pretty awesome. When we were reviewing our footage, this was one of the shots that we all really liked and it matches up well to what we intended it to look like.

Day 2 - Tuesday 24th November 2015


Most of the shots that we planned to film were using the panel backdrop. We wanted light to shine through the backdrop making it look illuminated so we set up two floor lights behind the panel and added a red/orange filter on it.

Me filming Monica and Gift performing

We initially wanted our group dance to be all four of us standing in front of it dancing. However, due to the limitations of space we made the decision to dance as twos and then try and intercut them when we edited the footage.






Upon reviewing our footage after Tuesday's shoot, we realised we had quite a few shots that we wanted to redo, some due to focusing issues with the camera and others due to wrong lighting and wrong framing. We revisited the shoot schedule and put stars next to the shots we wanted to redo.

Day 3 - Wednesday 25th November 2015

The focus for today's shoot was to film all of Angela's shot's in front of the black background with the lasers and one white spotlight and once we got that done, to film some of our filler shots such as the balloon popping one. This was a short shoot day, so we only had time to film a couple of shots, as we had to leave the studio by 5:15pm due to the studio being unavailable after this time.

 However, we faced quite a major problem with Angela's shots. As you can see in the images to the left, the spotlight makes the laser lights harder to see and the impact of the lasers are reduced. We therefore had to figure out a way to make the lasers more prominent whilst also being able to see her face. There are also massive shadows on the ones to the left which we didn't like. We therefore decided to point the spotlight not straight at the people but slightly to the side. By doing this, we eliminated the shadows, made the lasers more prominent but at the same time we can still see their faces as demonstrated by the picture on the right.