Day of the music video shoot

Today we went central London to do the final and main shooting needed for our music video. We had reached our location which was the golden jubilee bridge at 3pm perfect enough to get a bright view from the bridge whilst the sun was up. This was when it wasn’t too dark but not extremely bright as it is winter therefore we were there on the right time in order to get opening scenes whilst the sun was up and then we finished shooting with a sunset for the closing scene. We finished shooting around 5pm however there were some complications with lighting as well as getting the frame for the camera right

First of all the bridge was quite busy as it is a popular bridge with a beautiful view, but it was also quite narrow in terms of getting a wide angled shot with both the scenery and the actors in the frame. So we had little space to play with as we had to leave way for pedestrians who were trying to get across, and so we had the camera quite close to our characters which is why we took time getting out camera angles correct, so the pedestrians would not walk in front of the camera and would go behind. This way we would have clear shots with no one walking in front of the camera, however this did happen on several occasions which left us to retaking the same shot from the start t get it more accurate and so it would be easier to join the shots whilst editing.

Another problem with faced with in the beginning was that our main character was afraid of heights, something me and my group member were totally unaware of however by time he was used to the height of the bridge so managed to get quite close to the railing in the end anyway.

We had some technical difficulties on the day with the camera, for some reason neither me or my group member were able to get the camera stable on to the tripod which is why it made scenes where I was trying to pan quite difficult as well as holding the camera still on to the tripod whilst shooting. However when we took the camera and tripod back to college the next day and were asked to set it up again by the technicians we had done it perfectly well and the camera was stable. So it showed that the equipment was perfectly fine, we just had technical difficulties on the day, this may have been due to the weather as our hands were really cold and it as quite windy up on the bridge as well.

We managed to get all the shots needed from this location as a result it was good that we decided as a group not to choose Trafalgar square as our second location. This is because we lost daylight and the location was busier compared to the bridge when we visited it after anyway as it’s a big tourist attraction making it harder for us to shoot our video. It would also have been much more time consuming then the time spent shooting on the bridge.