Blog 14 - Shooting Diaries

I felt that all of the filming we done worked and went really well, we spent one day, filming for 4 hours straight and the following week doing the same amount of time. We felt this was enough time to complete what we wanted to. There were a number of hurdles we faced in the process of filming, our main one being the lighting, we wanted to create the atmosphere as if Kesha was at a house party and generally these would take place at night time, where alcohol and possibly drug taking would take place, the situation we were trying to set through out was that you see the effects of Kesha taking drugs but you don't physically see her doing it, by this I mean, we've used certain effects such as 'blurring' and 'handheld' camera movements during the filming to give the effect of Kesha 'hallucinating' from the drugs, from a distance and also from the actresses point of view. The main issue with the lighting was that it basically wasn't dark to show a party, the time we done the filming was during the day, but had to make it dark, so we had to close the curtains and certain doors to be able to get a maximum amount of darkness. Only after filming and capturing the footage did out teacher tell us that this actually worked really well, the lighting was enough for the actress to still be seen, and that if it was too dark that we wouldn't have been able to cope with the effects that we wanted to do as they wouldn't have looked very effective. Whilst my partner filmed certain shots/takes I would fill in the shooting scripts after each to comment on how it went, what worked what didn't and why it didn't work, I would say what shot was coming next, then we would swap roles so that we both had a chance to experience the filming and note-taking sides. After we captured all of the footage back, we became very confident that the final piece would work out really well, this was mainly based on our teacher giving us a lot of good feedback as well as giving his opinions on certain shots that we'd taken and how they worked and how in some cases they may not have. For example, we had a shot in the kitchen where Kesha is having a cigarette with herself, (formed by layering) where you see her sitting on the side, in the background you see the light coming in through the blind and it gives the room a really good effect, after our teacher saw this he gave us praise and told us that it was a really good shot and that if someone who didn't know had seen this they would think that it was an effect that we had used. So just his little inputs like that made us really positive that it would be a good piece.

Here is an example of our shooting script, this is an example of the first 6 shots that we took and the feedback that we gave after each shot, we carried this process on through out up until shot 10 where we began to improvise our video.