Shoot evaluation

This is a personal account of what the shoot day was like and what my job for the day consisted of. The day before the shoot we all went to do the set design in the studio as it needed to be set up before our shoot to sustain the time schedule we had organised for our shoot. This job mostly consisted of getting all of our sent items to our various houses together so that we could see what we had and what we were working with. We all began with making the flowers that were going to be appart of our girly set and by making them i mean that they were made out of paper and they all individually needed to be layered and split up to create the floral, 'volumised' effect that a flower has. After we had finished this we mainly focused on setting up everything for the girly set due to the fact that this was the most complex and this was going to be the first set that we were to shoot. To complete this task we had floral wallpaper that needed to glued on to the wall set up in the studio. This process was long so the design team had to continue this after we had to leave school, so that it was done by the next day.

On the day of the shoot i was excited to finally see our 'vision' and ideas come to life. I was worried that all of our sets were not yet ready to shoot and that this would cause us to take time out of our shoot to fix or do this process.

I think we tried to be well prepared for the shoot in advance but obviously the orders of some costumes for the actors had not yet arrived till the day before or the day of shoot and because of this we didn't know what all of the costumes looked like yet, as it is common that some pictures of outfits online don't always look the same when they are delivered. Luckily this was not the case and we were able to proceed. On the day of the shoot there were some things that needed to be finished off and this was that the flowers needed to be stapled on the back wall of the studio set. From seeing the throne chair the day before we had noticed that it was not really what we wanted, but because it was so close to the shoot day, on the shoot we had decided in the morning that we wanted to add bulbs on the chair to make it look more fancy and so that the set looked more visually interesting. Whilst members of my group did this i took the role of guiding the makeup artist and showing her what looks and in what order we wanted the actors to look like. To show her this i got up images for her for each look and introduced her to our actors.

When we actually began to shoot our first set, the set design actually looked a lot better then i thought it would for the girly set. I originally didn't think it would look this good because of the lack of detail on the throne and the red flowers in the wallpaper. This was solved by adding light bulbs to the chair which made it look more 'royal' and because we added bulbs to the chair we also decided to add bulbs on the set floor with the wires around the floor left loose, this looked really interesting and added more light the set that therefore made the red flowers on the wallpaper look the same colour as the flowers we had made, complimenting each other. I personally feel that we made the set look better then we thought it would.

Originally we had decided to divide the roles so that each person had one specific role and stuck to it throughout the day. However on the day we began to all take the same roles so we decided that there was a way that could benefit our shoot. This was to all have a go at every role but to take it in turns on each set. So i began with taking the role of the cameraperson and then sifted on to the director and e.t.c. This was a useful process for us to undergo because it meant that we all worked in union with each other because there wasn't just one person in control, the control was shared.

I think that guiding the actors on the blinders set was beneficial to the shoot because the dance needed to be improved and they needed to be isync. Some of the back up dancers didn't have enough emotion or interest in what they were doing so this meant that i had to motivate them, which s something that if eel i was good at doing. I was good at directing the actors without being to overpowering and i thought about my groups thoughts about it as well, rather then just doing what i thought was best.

Some of the problems that we had on the shoot revolved around the timing of everything. A major issue that we had was with the makeup artist because she occasionally took too long doing the actors makeup and this meant that the rest of the people on set had to wait for her to be ready. This was solved by us planning ahead for each set and finishing the set design for the next set before we shot it so that we did not waste anytime or lose anytime for the future sets to be shot. We also used other actors or dancers whilst this was going on so that we got more footage and were using our time wisely.

I personally think that the first set, this being the girly set, was the most successful because we were able to play around with the ages of the camera, which is something that we could not do with the other sets due to us running out of time for the shoot, so the last two shoots were rushed a bit. Also with this shoot we were able to make another set within it and this was because we decided to do a close up of the main actor against the floral wall, which actually gave the artistic visual look that she was 'lying on a bed of roses'.

I wish that the blinders set had gone a bit better then it had because the dancers weren't as interested in exaggerating the dance movements and although the dance had been choreographed, it had not been choreographed through the chorus so this meant that we had to make some dance moves up on the spot and motivate them more then we thought we would need to. Although this was not one of the most efficient sets we still have some valuable footage from it, so it was not a pointless set to shoot.

I think working with the actors was fun and we didn't have an issues with working with them except for the occasional times that we had to motivate the dancers sometimes. Overall they were easy to work with and we all had fun together, bouncing off of each others ideas. The part of my shoot that i enjoyed the most was taking on the role of the director because i felt that i could immerse myself more within the visual concepts of the shoot rather then looking through a lens to see it. When continuing this process on in the editing suite i am excited to see all of the footage but mostly i am excited to see how the UV has turned out and whether it is as exaggerated as i had hoped it to be in the original vision that we had all wanted to create.

Overall we all worked very well as a group and listened to each others ideas without one person taking over, we were able to all be equal partners to each other. The lessons that i had learnt from doing this shoot was that not everything always works out or looks the way you had hoped it to and that ways to make this better is to reply work with what you have and to think on the spot sometimes, because no matter how much you plan sometimes things don't always go according to that plan. To conclude this shoot went well and i still feel that we created what we had planned to create, which is why i don't think that our artwork ideas or website ideas will need to change to fit the design and vision in the footage that we shot.