Third Day of Filming

Date: Friday,4th January 2013
Location: Wood Green Shopping Center Carpark and Tottenham Cemetery

Crew:

Me: Actor/1st Assistant Director

Shayne: Director/Director of Photography

Tyrell: Camera Operator/Actor

On this day we began our third day of principle photography, in the same location we had used the day before.  Unfortunately Michael couldn't be with us as he had family matter to attend to. The third day itself, I believe was significantly more successful than the day before as we already had previous knowledge from the day before and knew how to deal with any difficulties (location wise).

 Like we did last time, we had checked the weather report of this filming day and had found that the weather conditions were similar to Thursday’s weather conditions meaning the shots that we had filmed on the last day would match with any shots that we filmed on that day of shooting.

We met at 11am, in Wood green to begin shooting . We met at this time to give us enough time during the day to film any shots we had missed out on the previous day, and to enable us to shoot in a different location for another scene.

The first thing we did as we arrived was to go to the managers office in order to get permission to commence the second day of shooting on the carpark roof. The manger was really nice and gave us half an hour to shoot on the roof and also told us not to include any shots with the shopping centers logo in them. After gaining the manager's permission to film on the carpark roof we took the lift up to the nineth floor and began our filming.

Our First Filming Location

Wood Green

In this location my role was as the main actor and I was in 99% of the shots that we had filmed on the roof. Tyrell started off as the camera operator and Shayne was the director for the whole shoot and he did a great job of it. Tyrell also excelled at his job role as he put forth alot of his own ideas as well as using a wide variety of camera angles in order to emphasise different aspects within our music video.

This part of the video was very succesful as I tried to improvise during some of the shots to create believability within the music video. I also introduced lots of shot ideas that i felt would pad out the music video and also give us a lot to play around with. To keep a sense of realism we tried to  abide by the 180 degree rule this meant all of the filmiing took placeon the right side of the characters in order to not disorientate the audience.

The introducion of our music video and the conclusion both take place on the roof and therefore we decided that instead of filming in chronological order it would be more time effective to filmboth scenes at the same time.

The intro only consists of the protagonist whereas the conclusion consists of the protagonist and his friend (played by Tyrell), therefore shayne had to take the role of camera operator and director. 

I feel that we all put in a great deal towards the filming. I felt that I did a really good job as I not only acted but also put forth alot of ideas for example during the confortation between the protagonist and his friend I put forth the idea of doing a Sergio Leone trademark style of having a lot of close-ups of the two characters in order to create tension between the two characters and also to build a steady rise of anticipation within the audience.

We were on the roof for a total of 90 minutes

We then went downstairs and filmed tyrells character as he runs towards the building looking for the protagonist. I filmed and directed this scene and had the idea of using a pov shot to see the sheer and immense danger that the protagonist was in..

Second Filming Location:

Tottenham Cemmetry

This image shows the setting for one of our scenes in the music video in which we see the protagonist walking through a cemmetery.

After we finished filming at around 1pm, we headed to Tyrell's house in order to charge the Video camera's battery and also to take a quick break and plan the next scene ahead i.e the camera shots, the location and planning our filming schedule. This time also enabled me to get changed into my costume for the scene we were about to film.

We reached Tottenham Cemmetry at around 3pm to begin filming we then scouted the area to find the perfect place to film. After we found the perfect place we began to film the scene in which we see the protagonist walk through the cemmetry, this was done to impose the foreboding presence of death ahead of the character and also to signify his depression .

The filming was difficult and even though it was only one shot, it had the camera doing a  pan in it and this created difficulty for Tyrell who was the camera operator for this scene as their was alot of jerkiness that required a steady of hand, however after a few tries we got the right shot.

Second Day of Filming

Date: Thursday, 3rd January 2013
Location: Edmonton Green and Wood Green shopping center car park

Crew:

Me : Actor/3rd Assistant Director

Michael: Director/ Camera Operator

Shayne: 1st Assistant Director/Production Manager

Tyrell: 2nd Assistant Director/Location Scout

On this day my team member and I decided to begin our second day of principle photography as it was the most convenient day for us all due to the Christmas holidays, however we were still able to communicate with each other through social networking and instant messaging this enabled us to set a date for our filming schedule and also to plan what scenes we were going to go ahead with to film on these days. the timing also pretty  crucial as the time of season meant that the days were shorter and this would affect our lighting and meant that we had to work efficiently and also had to be time effective, however the fact that it was winter helped set the tone for the video lighting wise as it gave it a dull and depressing feel.
         We started the day off by meeting up in Edmonton Green at 11.00am to check our location it was then that we met our first problem of the day. Although the roof itself was perfect visually the roof itself was not high enough and this didn't work for our POV shot in which the protagonist looks over the ledge, this would give a sense of the danger which faced our protagonist and his decision. To sort out this problem  me and Tyrell decided to scout a few of the surrounding flats to see if we could find a view which would be to show the view of our protagonist, so began our long and rigorous climb up 24 flights of stairs. The view itself was aesthetically pleasing, it was ruined by a grimy window. So we decide that we would just have to use the view from the original roof. As we got down to the roof we were met by two security guards who kicked us off the roof, as it was private property and we were not allowed to use it as a filming location.

Location: 24th floor of a flat in Edmonton Green

 The image above is a test shot we took of me looking out over a London area . This shot creates intertextuality between our music video and Eminem's 2010 music video for his hip hop song 'Not Afraid', in which Eminem is standing on a ledge looking out over Manhattan ,New York.

Wood Green 

After getting kicked off the roof we luckily remembered another location one of our friends had suggested to us. So we headed for the roof of a parking lot in Wood Green. When we arrived we realized that the location was perfect it was exactly what we were looking for and much better than the first location, However just as we were unloading our gear another security guard came and said that the roof was private property and that we needed permission from the general manager  to use it as a filming location, so we had to go downstairs to the management office and get permission to use the roof as a filming location. We spoke to the head of security and he said that it was fine to use the roof as long as we did not get any shots of the buildings logo (for copyright reasons). We got back up to the roof and began filming the first scene of our video in which we see the protagonist journey onto the roof, however ten minute into filming we ran out of battery on our video camera had to buy a charger from a phone shop in order to charge the camera however we found that there was nowhere to charge the camera within the vicinity. In order to make the best of our time that we had we headed to Tyrell's house to discuss our next approach and to plan further filming. At Tyrell's house we decide to make the best of our current situation and decided to film some interior scenes. We then rescheduled our filming to the 4th of January.

Music Video Stills

This is a shot of the landscape taken from the roof of the carpark this would then act as the protagonist  point of view.

This image shows Michael directing me into position for on of the shots out of the video.

This image shows Michael filming me near the edge of the roof.

My Groups Album Cover

My ideas for My groups album cover.

• A shot of a London area. This would be the british version of the actual singles cover which shows a rundown area of detroit contrasted with the actual city of detroit.
• An image of a pair of old worn shoes sat in middle of two pairs of clean brand new shoes. This connotes the meaning of the song itself which is to be unique and also to be happy with who you are. It alsop relates to a common theme throughout our video which is of the protagonist's worn out pair of shoes.
• Another idea would be to take a scene out of the video itself and use it as an image for our album cover. This would be of  our protagonist sitting on the sofa , he would be wearing mostly gray clothes  with a stern look on his face while around him people are in brightly coloured clothes and are walking past with smiles on their faces. This would bear intertextuality to the cover of a ' 40 year old virgin' by Judd Apatow and also the 'Assassins Creed' cover.