account of shoot day

On the morning of our shoot day, we gathered all of our dancers and band members after breakfast. We had already prepared the set for our performance room the night before. The dancers were sent with Megan and Cat to go through basic dance sequences, most of our dancing was however improvised. Me and george were in the studio preparing our band and doing the last touches to the set, we had a few dry runs with the band so that they knew the feel of the song as a group and how we wanted them to perform. Most of our band had learnt the song on their chosen instruments and our singer felix had learn the lyrics, this made the whole performance much easier to conduct.

Our first room was the performance room, this was a pure white room with the instruments and speakers set up. We found that setting up the speakers and the instruments was the easy bit of filling our set but plugging all the wires in to all the speakers and synth was time consuming. We managed to wrap up the performance room in about an hour, and whilst we were finishing up, megan and cat started to paint the girls in uv body paint. They wanted to achieve a mix of different patterns with a tribal underlying theme. The girls came back into the room and the paint looked good but not incredible, then we turned on the uv lights and they just lit up. It looked incredible. The paint had been placed so that as our dancers moved and contorted with the music the bends were elaborated. This looked incredible. Megan directed the girls dancing from the sequence she had prepared and the freestyle element. Some of our dancers could perform tricks such as jumps and back bends which looked very effective in the uv.

After a short 30 minute lunch break we gathered felix, our singer and our dancers and we had set up our laser room, we had six red laser pens and 6 green laser pens, we got our dancer to stand and dance with the lights off and smoke machine on, we then lit her up from both sides with the laser pointers. This looked very good in the room but I was doubtful about what it would look like on the camera as it was not me filming at that time. But looking back on the footage, it really looked amazing. We had to slow the shutter speed down very much so that the effect could be amplified which gave it a blurry movement look but still very good. We then did shots of all the girls dancing with the lasers on them in the room but it was hard to illuminate all of them at one time as we only had 12 laser pens. But this still worked very effectively. We shot a variety of different shots in this room to give us more room when editing for change.

We then set up a green screen room and had our lead singer do hand movements as if he was in a minority report type computer, this looked quite funny as it was just green screen but once we have edited it and added sfx then it should look amazing.

Our final room was a dry ice room, this was a dancing aspect again and we gathered the dancers. We had had great problems earlier on in the day as we were not sure whether the dry ice was going to arrive, due to their being a problem with the delivery. But in the end it came. This did mean that we had to save this room until last when we had planned on shooting it earlier in the day. But it worked out being the best order of shooting anyway.

I felt that the shoot day went incredibly well despite some minor problems with the dry ice and the uv paint on the girls starting to crack. It was a very successful shoot and I look forward to the editing process.