On the 4th September 10:30am we all decided to meet up in Glinton to prepare of filming, as it was the only day where everyone was off work and free to do some work. We first had some problems with the choice of actor as Joey Yeboah was meant to be the main actor, staring the role of Kid Cudi, then we asked a few other people who had potential to replace Joey due to him being slightly un-reliable, as he is working within a different group. Therefore I kindly suggested to Modey to ask his mate Dom Bennett who was a previous media student at AMVC in 2009. Luckily Dom agreed to take the role of Kid Cudi and met us all up in Glinton. Around 11:00am we all check if the equipment was fully charged and all props were accessible if needed. We all walked down to school to check if it would be open on a Sunday! Which it wasn’t, however this didn’t stop us from filming as we went to the local shop in Glinton to buy some Coco-cola as we knew we would need to use this at some point of the day.
Then we walked to Pekirk as this was one of our chosen locations, decided in our location report. We eventually found the alleyway which we wanted to film in. We successfully got permission to film in between the houses if we weren’t going to disturb anyone. After 15 mins later we created approximately 12 shots of Dom Bennett walking down the alleyway towards the bright light. This look extremely effective and exactly how I imagined it, as he looks really dark like a tall shadow walking towards the light. We also wanted to experiment with the use of shots, as we wasn’t sure how long we had Dom Bennett for and the lighting would change if we didn’t get it done in time, as i was really fond of the lighting, creating a glowing, dull type of natural lighting.
After all the filming in Pekirk was finished we walked back to Sam’s house to do the filming in the room and the shot where we advertise the coca-cola bottle in an unique way, by experimenting with the camera movement. We felt that using a flip camera would be the easiest technology to use when filming this complex shot that took a lot of time to get “near to perfect”. The type of camera movements that we were aiming for today was very difficult as the tri-pod didn’t come into use as the shots we needed to create could only be done by hand held. This did give us a lot of pressure as we didn’t want to make the camera look shaky when it comes to the editorial stages of the construction and production.
As we suddenly needed to use Dom Bennett as our main actor there was a lot of pressure on him to get the lip syncing perfect. I knew this was going to be a massive problem to whoever our actor was going to be, due to the song being extremely unknown. However, we strongly felt like we needed a song that wasn’t going to be compared to an official video by the same artist. Therefore we put Dom into the deep end and asked him to learn the lyrics to the shot we needed from him. To help it out a bit we played the song in the back ground so he can get the lips in the correct time and place, to make the video appear more natural. This was very hard and time consuming. Lip syncing was made really easy in our preliminary as we had a natural born singer who knew the lyrics of the Jazon Maraz song by heart. So filming today became very stressful and frustrating, however we still motivated Dom with the singing and produced some good effective shots.
Overall I felt that today was successful and we have managed to produce some really good camera angles and shots. Domic was a very good actor when he gained confidence with the whole surreal environment and unique shots, and the lighting was at our advantage today as the weather was raining and dull just how we wanted it to be. More dull and surreal when he is trapped and brighter colours and shots when he is in the ‘real world’.
Rachel Louise Taylor 