Diary of Filming - Day 6 "Final Day" ~ William Dixon

Today we aimed to get all the filming done. We achieved this with much relief. Luke and I filmed the final scene of the video at 2pm when it was light enough for the shots to make it seem like morning. We did these shot's in 1-2 takes so it didn't take long at all considering it was only 4 shots all together. In the evening me and Luke filmed the rest. We got the storyboard, went over each page one by one checking to see if we had any gaps and when there was one, we went and filmed it. We kept this up until eventually there was nothing else to film. So we packed everything up and left my house about 8pm. A very satisfying film as it was our last, it was more of a relief though if anything.

Diary of Filming - Day 5 ~ Luke Leadbetter

Today we decided to start a bit earlier. Arriving at Will's at 5, myself and Will immediately set about filming more shots, completing two pages of the storyboard. Jess turned up soon after and we continued to do stop motion shots until she left. The stop motion went well and majority without hiccups. After completing all the shots we could think of that we hadn't done for stop motion, Jess left, leaving myself and Will with another 3 hours to get as much as we could done. With Will's stomach full of margarita pizza, we were raring to go and really were surprised about how much we squeezed in, nearly filling the tape (We had 7 minutes left!) Overall it was a very successful nights filming, what we did achieve was to - what we think - a good standard.

Diary of Filming - Day 4 ~ Luke Leadbetter

In our latest filming venture, Jess and myself managed to squeeze in a couple more hours of work. However, due to lack of preparation of software we wasted about 40 minutes of this. Once we had software set up however, we dived straight into filming some stop motion shots. Due to time restrictions, we only managed to get 2 of them done,  much to our own dislike.

Diary of Filming - Day 3 ~ William Dixon

This day, we went to my house to film for a few hours. We actually got quite a bit done in the space of two hours. We redid some shots that we noticed didn't look good in the editing process, we also managed to do some new shots, including one shot which we were concerned with which involved panning around the puppet and keyboard and then the laptop and puppet. This shot actually turned out fine. We also started the shots with the puppet and guitar. Finally we got all but one shot that we needed finish during the first 20 seconds of the video which was the panning of the props and setting creating the establishing shots. All in all, a good day of filming.

Diary of Filming - Day 2 ~ Luke Leadbetter

On our second day of filming we all converged upon Will's house at 5pm. After making sure the set was exactly as it was the last time we filmed we started straight away to film the shots we missed last time, due to lack of props. This time we remembered to bring Will's electric guitar and a desk lamp, allowing us to do a pan across the guitar and the desk. We filmed a few shots before Jess had to leave at 8, leaving myself and Will to continue filming until we decided we'd done enough for the night at 9. Will and myself managed to a large amount of shots, surprising ourselves with how much we got done. We discovered more difficulties with hiding the puppeteer in several shots, but we managed to overcome this with large quantities of small cramped spaces and pain. Overall it was a very successful session and I now very much look forward to editing our clips in our next lesson.

Diary of Filming - Day 1 ~ Jess Hitch

Last night we filmed the first few shots of our music video. It was fun setting up the room to how we wanted it and the coloured lights which Luke borrowed from church looked very cool in the dark, almost exactly how we imagined it whilst we were story-boarding.
Before we started, we made a mini-vlog just giving a tour of our setting for the blog and also a mini-vlog for the lighting, they'll be uploaded as soon as we've edited the first part of our filming.

We started at around 6 when the sun was down so that none of the light ruined our setting which worked out well, however, it did mean that we didn't have a lot of time to film before I had to go home. Luckily, they boys stayed behind for a few more hours after I'd left and got a few more shots done.
It was fun filming with the puppet because as soon as we saw it for the first time, we knew that we'd made a good decision about choosing to use that instead of filming the performance aspects with a real actor.

Today we decided that instead of doing all the filming at once, we were going to film a bit, then edit it when we're not filming to save more time. This should make things work more efficiency because some of us can be working on the filming while the other films. It also works out well because I can also do some editing at home as I also have Final cut Express. So today we're editing some of the shots that were usable since most of the shots were just to get an idea as to where and how were were going to go about shooting some of the more awkward positions (ie. trying to hide the puppeteer behind the bed whilst still having enough room to move the puppet naturally.)

So having watched what we filmed back on the computer, we realized that we would have to re-film a few of the shots due to minor issues with framing and lighting but that shouldn't take too long as now we know what to do to make our shots better.

- Jess Hitch

Diary of Filming - Day 0 ~Jess Hitch

Today we'll be filming after school at Will's house. It will be about sundown so around 4 o' clock when we start filming, this is to make sure that we keep to the fact that our main character has woken up at night so filming in the day with the sun streaming through the windows was out of the question.

We have decided to leave the stop-motion elements until last so that we have an idea how the live elements will interact with them and also to see if we can recreate the stop-motion away from the set and thus saving more time.

We've made a list of all the things each of us needs to bring to decorate the set. I'm bringing:

• Coloured disco ball
• Fishing wire
• ipod
• torches
• Cellofane - for creating coloured light 

The camera will be booked and we'll be ready to go at sundown!

We're all looking forward to it.

- Jess Hitch