Music Video: 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