Production Update 3 - Electric Soldier Guitar

A day earlier than promised! Huzzah.

In this video, I decide how I'm going to go about filming with the strobe light, and then have a go at testing the editing effect I wish to use in the final piece.

The idea behind the shots in that test at the end is that the guitar on the stand is a placeholder for me. I couldn't be in this as I was in charge of the camera and the torch - when I film the final thing, I'll have someone else covering those duties.

From this I've established a few things -

• The qtxlight strobe light seems to be the most practical to use when filming the video; so I will use that when recording my main performance.
• The rapid cuts to the strobe shot actually work well! This is something I'm really glad about; it creates the 'detached' feeling I've been aiming for since my original concept.
• The contrast between static and moving shots work well - the regular shots are static (well, as static as they can be when I'm holding the camera without a tripod whilst also moving around a torch...) whilst the strobe shots have a degree of movement to them. In the final piece, I will use a combination of pan and zoom shots - more variety will re-emphasise the detached concept.
• The torch also works well! I wasn't expecting this; I just used it for the test due to a lack of better lighting. I could use the torch to create a similar effect to what I was originally going to use the chroma-keyed backgrounds for - to show the light floating around, representing the clash between hero and dark in the performer's mind.

-HM.

Production Update 1 - It begins...

Yesterday, as mentioned in the planning post, I started filming the performance section of the video, with assistance from Mr. N..

In terms of equipment, I decided we should approach this with a multi-camera setup; this is because I want to have multiple different angles and using multiple cameras for this is less time consuming than having to shoot each part over and over for each angle. I would usually point out that this also helps out with avoiding continuity errors, but in this case I'm actually going out of my way to avoid perfect continuity from shot to shot to represent the broken manner in which the performer sees himself (the whole light vs. dark thing).

The cameras we've used are my Bloggie which Mr. S. issued me at the start of last year that I've sort of... kept, and three more Bloggies which I borrowed from the Media Studies department.

To keep the cameras in place we used the tripods from the store room; each one of these attaches to the camera in a slightly different way which is wonderfully inconvenient... but oh well. They did what they needed to do.

I also borrowed Sir's laptop - this was used to play the song which I could use as reference when miming. A slight problem I've noticed is that in some parts I am slightly late starting; though this can easily be fixed with the "left a bit, right a bit" method in FCP.

Unfortunately as the backup of the footage is on the school computer I'm not able to put together one of those fancy raws montages like I did with the Sheena is a T-shirt Salesman raws; but I do have my Bloggie with me so enjoy these screenshots of me looking like a complete plonker.

-HM.