Half-term seemed the best time to start, as well as finish, the entire construction of the music video: we thought we had all the props and equipment we needed, the background was deemed satisfactory by us (as we couldn't find anything better) and we had the time we needed to film on our hands.
The location we chose to shoot in was in my living room, though it is quite small (there were no other available locations for us, and we just couldn't think of any). We were able to block out the daylight pretty well, so no ambient light affected our shots. the artificial lights - we only used 1 Lilliput and one red head because there wasn't any more space to use a third light and place it behind the performer (so we didn't use three point lighting), and anyway, we didn't have enough arm strength to open the third goddamn stand - were placed in front of the performer, quite close to them, at 45 degree angles.
The background was an old duvet cover I found deep within my mother's closets. as we were influenced by the title sequence of the film Amélie (i once watched the sequence while listening to our chosen track, and the visuals and the song went well together), we wanted to create something with a similar feel, but we didn't want to copy it, and so we decided of not using a green background but something of a different colour. We noticed there were three colours dominating the sequence, which were red, green and yellow. Those colours complimented each other well, so we tried to keep to the colour scheme.
We also thought about the rule of thirds while filming, to make the shots dynamic, as music videos need to be full of dynamism.
We had drawn a rough storyboard to follow, but many of the shots we discovered by improvising and experimenting a little (we filmed a shadow shot that I liked but which didn’t make the music video). Me being in front of the camera instead of behind it (which was where I desperately wanted to be) Hafsah was the one who caught the shots.
All of us were busy in one form or another on various days and hours, so we couldn’t all film together every day of the week, but we were able to film on three days of that half term, from 9:30 or 10 to 12 or 2pm, depending on our time tables. Filming was long, as we didn’t have as many hands as we would have wanted, and we didn’t finish the filming in the end.
The footage and photographs seemed fine on the camera, but when we loaded them onto my laptop, they didn’t look very good at all.
We had to shoot the whole thing all over again.
By this time we were feeling very panicky – nothing was going right, time seemed to be against us – our hearts were losing faith. But we would never think of giving up; we already put so much work and effort into it.
We scheduled more shooting days – again we had to work around each other’s time tables – and filmed more shots. This time they looked much better (the colours were washed out in the previous shots. Of course we knew we could manipulate the colours during the editing process, but the original shots needed to be good, too) and we were pleased with them, as they were, we thought, the best we were going to get under the circumstances.
