Further Filming Updates

Last week I hit a rather bumpy patch in terms of completing the filming so I could move swiftly on to editing as I learned that because of exams the two people I had asked to do the guitar parts had been unable to fully learn the song, obviously this presented me with a huge dilemma. I could either hope that they had learned enough of the song to piece together a decent performance, or completely cut them out, which then would have presented a lot of visual problems, with there just being a singer and a drummer. I asked the guys if they thought they could play most of the song, "convincingly" enough to pull off a decent performance that I could edit with quick cuts to mask any mistakes made, and they both said that, that wasn't really a possibility because they really hadn't learnt much of the song at all. So I had to let the drummer down, which was extremely unfortunate because he had actually taken time to learn his part, and decided to go with just a vocal cover.

Fortunately in the early stages of development I took a few rough drawings down on what this might look like and how I might make just having a singer look more visually interesting. (i will upload these pictures when i get back to college, as i dont have a scanner at home.)

As you can see I had various ideas of what might make this more interesting, firstly the changing backgrounds (via greenscreen) throughout the song seemed like a very interesting prospect technically speaking but I had to take into account the theme and tone of the song and this did not fit at all as it is much darker than this.

Secondly I thought that having the singer appear in places the narrative has already been through was quite interesting, in terms of the storyline at least. because the main character of the storyline winds up searching for the singer, it could be a nice twist if he had been following him the whole time, however I just didn't like something about this idea, i wanted the two places to be separate until the very end, and for the twist to remain until then, and keep the audience wondering who the main character is actually searching for.

Interestingly the idea that I came up with was actually an accidental idea. A few days after doing these drawings I was still thinking about the music video and I walked into the studio where i was going to be filming the performance to see if my teacher was in there. The studio must have been used as a classroom in the period before this because there were chairs scattered around the room and once I saw this I imagined filming in front of it, with a few lights in the background, and one light on the performer, and I really liked the idea, so I drew how i imagined it would look and still liked the idea, the song is quite weird and dark in tone and I imagined that these unknown chairs in the background would only add to this mildly dark and extremely odd and confusing atmosphere. Other than this there is no real link to the song, but I just felt that aesthetically it was very pleasing and i could find no faults with it in terms of matching the videos tone and themes.

I have now filmed the performance with this idea, and got every shot I need and a few extra shots that were merely me playing around with the camera, they might make it into the final cut, if there is room.

All that is left to film now is one shot for the narrative that I realised today that I forgot to get the other week, however this can be done during the editing process and slotted in whenever.