Filming Diary: Session 2

As my actress was ill the day of our proposed filming session, we re-scheduled it for a week later, Saturday the 30th of November. I texted her a couple of days in advance to check that she was well enough to film. I picked her up at 11:30pm so she had time to get ready at my house before we started filming.

Once we got to my house I spent about 30 minutes getting Ellie ready. Not much was required as the costume was exactly the same as the previous filming session. She had done her own hair and makeup like I  requested previously (natural looking). She put on the white Dorothy Perkins dress that I had bought especially for the shoot, tights and her own lace up boots.

After getting ready me and Ellie were driven to the outskirts of the woods, this took about 2 minutes. We were driven by one of my parents who has over 30 years of driving experience so there was little chance of any accident occurring. We filmed in 2 different locations in the woods, the first was an open field that could be accessed via the woods, we filmed here for about 40 mins. The other location was a pathway in the woods, we filmed here for another 40 mins. It was quite cold up in the woods due to the high altitude of the location so I made sure my actress had a break every 10-15 minutes, she brought a coat to wear and I provided her with a flask of hot tea which she could drink to keep herself warm. While filming, we took pictures for the ancillary texts and these will be featured in a future blog post.

We finished filming and taking pictures in this location at about 2:30pm. We got back into the car and we were driven to our last filming location, the South Cave cemetery. We only filmed here for 20 minutes so my parent stayed in the car observing at all times. The majority of the footage taken here was in front of the sun, the sun was beginning to set so it was low. We managed to get some excellent footage of the artist lip-syncing the lyrics of the song while stood in front of the sun, this gave a natural lens glare effect, which I found effective. The last shot we filmed was of my actress walking around the cemetery. We finished filming in this location at about 3:00pm.

Here are some behind the scenes pictures showing my actress and me preparing to film.

I used the exact same equipment as before, the Canon 600d camera and the Velbon tripod, they worked very well. I also used the same technique for the actress's lip-syncing by bring both a copy of the lyrics and my IPhone so I could play the song on location so her timing was perfect.

We wrapped up this final filming session at 3:00pm and I would regard this as being a highly successful video shoot. Originally we thought our schedule was too big to film everything in one day so we planned to film on Sunday December 1st aswell. Due to my organisation and my actress's patience, we managed to get everything on the list filmed in 3 hours. The competence of the shoot also means its unlikely we'll have to do pickups. The extra week I got to plan this filming session definitely paid off because it went much more smoothly than expected and we got all we needed in a short amount of time.