Our Shoot Day for our new idea

After deciding our location and finalizing our idea we decided to film it on a Friday after school in which we had time all of mid-day to late afternoon to set up and film. We didn't need to book or schedule far in advance as the school theatre would not be operational when all the students went home. Therefore all that was available were teachers, the film crew/actors and resources. We filmed our animatic a few days before in which we were able to get a certain idea of the shots we want to create but not necessarily include all of them. Also, as all the teachers were at school, we were able to use Mr Simon Wood as our presenter. We cleared all the chairs from the room and managed to reassemble the stage so it was in a formation that elevated the drum kit and had both guitarists on the sides with the singer at the front. Here is the formation we made the day before...

First off we got our teacher and filmed him by the curtain presenting our live performance for the Ed Wood show. As we were creating a parody he presented in several different accents such as Russian, Australian, English and American. We thought the filming went well and that our teacher had a great script in which he improvised some of it as he has had previous acting experience before. After this we set up the stage which took about twenty minutes as it required heavy lifting. The props were brought in as personal possessions however the drum kit, microphone and amplifiers were all taken from the music rooms but it was helpful that the equipment from the music department was directly opposite the theatre. Time wise we aimed to do it for 5 hours even though we had more to spare as we weren't in a completely time strict place. After collecting the equipment we set it up on stage and managed to get the song played through the theatre speakers via auxiliary. We started filming and managed to improvise all the moves with the playing of the instruments and luckily our lead singer is an experienced live performer and was able to perform some authentic rhythmic moves that worked well with the idea. As a group we worked well and managed to capture all our camera shots in which we filmed a few more shots. However in several shots the lead singer didn't know the lyrics to the specific part, therefore we knew that editing would not tolerate these mistakes. We also captured several shots of the musicians but added a few wideshot's of them singing the chorus to act as if they are part of the singing. We also had one person controlling the lights from the top kiosk for the flood and stage lights. He was very inexperienced with them so it took a while to get the right light to use at the beginning of the performance. Furthermore he wasn't able to change the brightness so we didn't know whether it was too much. We managed to complete several wide shots and extreme close-ups as we planned as we didn't want to film the video from one take, thus mixing in present day technology and mixing it with the past. Some areas we could of improved were the playing of the instruments which weren't always played to time and didn't look like the right chords necessary for the song. Our main concern was the water and the symbol shot because we weren't sure we would be able to capture it perfectly without damaging the lens, but we managed to zoom in on the instrument and successfully did it with no errors. This was due to myself not hitting the symbol as hard as we wanted to. Overall I think the shoot day went exceptionally well, we filmed every shot that we wanted to include and managed to easily access resources. However it may have been better to have rehearsed or learnt the lyrics especially as it is a hard song to sing and as well maybe learn the actual chords for the song making it more realistic. It was much more challenging than if we did a narrative based/slower paced song and we were willing to put ourselves to that test and see if we could film something unlike any other media music video. Here are some images and a video from the day.....