TW: Brighton Relection

Last week our class took a trip to Brighton in order to conduct a location reccie and practice camera techniques, we have edited the footage we took in Brighton in order to make a short music video. Although we had freedom of filming, we also had a criteria of shots to take:
2x Internal Locations
2x External Locations
Tracking Shot
Medium Close up
Close up
360 pan shot
Pan shot
Low angle shot
High Angle shot
Sped up time lapse shot
Establishing shot

Strengths/what I learnt:

• I think our main strength of the reccie was the amount of quite stylish and artistic shots we took which we thought matched the song Daffodils by Mark Ronson well due to the funk genre and the artists image, this is partly due to the very arty areas around Brighton such as the Lanes, where we did the majority of filming. 

This is also as we wanted our practice task to look of best quality in order to progress further with other filming tasks.

• We met the shot criteria well, capturing every shot specified and shooting in 2 external locations and 1 internal location. 

This is important as the criteria allowed us to try and practice taking new, different shots that we had not used in past tasks, providing us with these shots also gave us inspiration to think of other inventive ways we could capture footage for a music video.

• Another strength was our time management, we managed to film in several different areas all around Brighton, and with only 3 hours to do this I believed we worked efficiently as we left with more than enough footage to fit the song. 

This helped us to realise how important time management is when shooting, this is because music videos generally have a higher cutting rate and a larger variety of shots than other forms of media, showing us that it is very important to plan and work through a shot list quickly but effectively, as leaving with an incomplete amount of shots can mean a second shoot would be required- this can form problems with meeting deadlines or having disjunctive footage than doesn't match.

• We thought that the weather in Brighton helped to push our footage further and make it more relevant to the song, which is upbeat and funky, which works well with footage of a clear and sunny day.

This shows us that the weather when shooting is actually going to be very important to set the mood of our music video, showing that perhaps a dance song would look better with visuals that are colourful and lively, unlike dull and rainy.

Weaknesses:

• One weakness could be that we did not explore following a traditional narrative when filming, instead using a variety of shots that do not follow a specific story and match the song mostly through editing, for example montage editing.

Moving forward: This shows how perhaps practicing different methods of filming videos such as performance based or traditional narrative based videos may help with our research into making a video of high quality.

• We did not manage to film in as many internal locations as we wanted to, meaning some of the shots we might have used were not taken.

Moving forward: This teaches us that when carrying out location reccies for our real music video, it is worth trying different things and using creative locations as it can make the video even more interesting.

Below is some stills taken from the reccie:

Brighton stills- TWGSB media from gthresher97