Dance : The Shoot

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Go Team Elysian! 

We began the day by collecting the equipment from Mollie's house at 8:30am - an early start! We got there for about 9am and began setting up. We had a few changes with the lighting set up which held us back from the production schedule. We realised that having the lights directly behind was not a good idea as the we couldn't get a soft enough depth of field to blur them out. We obviously didn't want the lights to be obviously studio lights! This resulted in us putting one light and the back corner and another in the same position on the back corner opposite. We made the lights go as high as they could in order to make them shine downwards on the dancers - almost like the sun at the water's surface. A lot of blue gels were placed on the lights to give them a blue tint and make them give off a more water vibe. 

Setting up equipment

The original lighting set up before alterations

While we were altering the light positions, we asked the dancers to do rehearsals to practise their dance to get more in the swing of things and warm up before the shoot began. I found it really exciting seeing the dance in it's final stage on set rather than just in the SU, and it felt like everything had just come together. 


Practising before filming starts

By the time we started filming we were over an hour behind on the schedule. However, even though this made me slightly anxious, this was not a problem as I had scheduled it so that if anything went wrong, we would have later than the production schedule's leaving time to complete things and work through problems. In the production schedule we were scheduled to finish and pack up by about half 6, however we had booked the room until 8pm. This meant we had plenty of time to sort everything out and I just moved all shots and tasks back by an hour. 

We shot the film based off the four "phases" we had created during rehearsals. The phases were basically different sections, similar to when we came up with the original concept and separated our ideas into the beginning, middle and end. For each phase we would get all the shots, from wide to mid to above angles to panning shots, before moving on to the next phase and repeating. We saved the majority of glide cam shots for the end of the shoot, so Tom didn't have to switch between using it and setting it down (as it's very heavy!). On set I took on the role of making sure the production was running on time, and if not re-time things so that we would definitely finish.  I also made note of once a shot was completed on the production schedule so that we could keep track of what we still had to do. I also assisted in taking behind the scenes footage and some photos, to make a little edit at a later stage and document our work.

Me keeping track of the schedule!

Apart from the main group of me, Laura, Mollie and Katherine, we also got the help of Thomas, Shahid and Lucy. Thomas was on camera, due to Laura having a bad back and not being able to use the glide cam, while Shahid and Lucy were runners. This was off great help to us and we really appreciate them being there for us as an extra pair of hands and more opinions. Josh even made a surprise appearance at one point and then became our "caterer" as we would get him to go get us drinks and food from our bags! 

Tom focusing on getting the shot

Here are some photos I took of the dance / dancers throughout the day : 











Reflection

Even though it was a bit of a shaky start I feel the shoot went pretty well. It was so nice seeing our vision that we've put so much of our efforts into over the past few months come to life - there's been times when we doubted it was ever going to happen so getting it done was a big relief and accomplishment for us! I'm so proud of us for overcoming all the obstacles and making it happen in the end. I think this goes to show you that if you work hard enough, most likely good things will happen. We're all exhausted at the moment, it's been a very long day. However saying that I feel like I can speak for everyone when I say we had a lot of fun on set. Emma and Harry are amazing and very fun performers and it was an absolute joy to work with them on this. We were all laughing in between takes at various conversations we were having or general banter!  I feel so lucky to have worked with such a motivated crew, not even just as a crew but also as my friends. Of course there were various problems throughout as there is on any shoot, but we overcame these and got on with the job, and as a result I really hope that we've made something that reflects all of our work and passion for the project. 




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