Account of shoot day

We decided to film the music video on a Friday after school as we finished early and the school would be empty so there would be no distractions and we could get it done. Overall, the filming took us around 3 hrs. 

We began filming the intro first. We filmed our media teacher Simon Wood because he has amateur experience in acting and is good at different accents. This was important as we weren't sure how we wanted the TV show presenter to act or sound. We trialled different accents, trying American, Russian and Australian. We wanted to create a 1950's Beatles era feel to it, where the presenter would be on one stage in the studio just in front of a black curtain, and the camera would cut to the other side of the studio where the band will play. We came to the conclusion that the american accent would be the best option. We wanted to create a pastiche rather than a parody and thought the american accent would be more realistic. We also filmed an outro where the presenter says "How 'bout that band!" This was a very common saying on those type of shows in america at the time. We only had to film the intro and outro twice as the presenter already knew what to say and we just had to perfect it.

We then moved into our school theatre which had a stage set up for the school production. We weren't happy with it and so got permission to move the units that makes the stage to change the shape to more of a "live music" feel. This took a while to decide on the best set but we wanted the video to look as similar to a live studio performance as possible. We wanted a small stage either side, so the lead guitarist and bassist were more visible and to create more of a concert feel. We also raised the drums slightly above the main walk way so that the drummer could be more visible behind the lead singer. By raising the drummer even more we had to take health and safety precautions to make sure that the stage was save and had no chance of breaking. As you can see on the right is a lectern. We covered the lectern with black curtains so that in the music video - which was going to be black and white anyway - it would blend in to the black curtains at the back. 

Luckily, we had the use of the tech box so we could use lighting and spotlights on the band. We had two options on how to film the song. We could either film many individual shots which would get confusing as we would forget where we were up to in the song. Or we could film the performance the whole way through from start to finish, at a number of different angles and then make sub-clips when editing. We decided to do both! We filmed the whole song with the performance around 6-7 times from different areas with different amounts of zoom e.g a wide shot, a close up of the lead singer, and close up of drummer. After that there were certain specific shots that we wanted to include in the music video such as capturing the vibrations of the bass drum and close up shots of the bassist and lead guitarist so we filmed them as well.