Production - Second Day of Filming

Yesterday marked our second and most substantial day of filming. We met up at college at 1pm to collect the equipment - camcorder, tripod, spotlight and batteries (these were heavy and annoying to carry), umbrella (in case it rained), memory cards, and digital camera. We then got on the bus and headed to Poppy's house where we dumped the equipment and had some tea courtesy of Poppy (and Charon, you would have thought we were at her house, not Poppy's haha!) After some discussion about what we were going to film and the mise-en-scène, we decided to head out to Queen's Wood as the weather was overcast but not rainy (and remained so until it started pouring down when we headed home).



Before this, we narrowed down and decided on the three main costumes that Poppy would wear: a grey-ish dress for most of the daylight scenes, together with a flowery crown; a much more striking flowy red dress for the evening scenes, to connote a sort of 'tranformation' and emphasize the contrast between day and night; and a black sparkly dress for the fairylight shots. The make-up for the woodland shots were influenced by the ideas we discussed during out planning, however, for the fairylight scene, we opted for glitter covering Poppy's eye area (in a similar way to the white face-paint design we used for the projection scene). Below you can see the different combinations of costume and make-up for the corresponding scenes, which I think worked really well, giving Poppy a consistently unconventional artist image.

Mustafa was the main camera operator, with Charon also contributing to filming several shots. I was mainly in charge of playing the music, taking photos of the process, including many that we could potentially use for the rest of the promotional package we will be creating, and helped set everything up. We shot a substantial number of base tracks, including more experimentation with speed editing (lip-syncing to double speed version of the track this time, which once slowed down in editing will have Poppy on the swing moving slowly as she lip-syncs in time). We then headed back to Poppy's house for a costume/make-up change, then went back out again.

 By this time it was getting quite dark so we made sure to get a few daylight shots with the second costume, and then proceeded to film in the dark. The spotlight provided great lighting, and we really liked the outcome of these shots (as well as the others we filmed so far). We also filmed a few shots using a strobe light effect from Poppy's phone, which Poppy originally suggested early on in the planning process, that resulted in quite a creepy and unnerving effect. Some other notable takes include a few where we used sparklers, one of Poppy in a tree as the camera circles her, and another where a cat randomly walked into the shot! (Note that the poor thing was all alone in the woods at night and kept coming over to our light - I just wanted to take it home!) By the time we got back to Poppy's house again, we were really pleased with our shots, and realized that we'll probably have everything we need by the end of the day. Finally, we proceeded to film our last shots in a windowless room in Poppy's house, with Poppy covered in fairylights!



Altogether, and because of how productive the day was, I'd say we have at least ten great base tracks (plus countless others) so we have a lot of footage to choose from. In addition, we have only about twenty minutes of free space on the two 16GB memory cards. Because of all this, we have decided that it wouldn't be worth our time to film in Parkland Walk too, which we weren't too enthusiastic about filming in in the first place. I am now anticipating putting together the music video to see the first real result of our efforts as a group!