And man, was it tiring! But it was great! Again I got to play with the big Sony HVR-S270E, which put my shoulder out last time I used it! A few weekends ago I was using it for the first time under instruction from a couple of knowledgable friends of friends, this time I was going it alone.
Luckily, it went really well, the camera didn't give me any problems, and I was actually getting pretty good at finding my way around it. It really is nowhere near as complicated as I feared, despite it looking like a huge weight of dials and buttons! It is still very heavy, but this time I was a little more careful and made sure to be aware of my movements and exertions while picking it up or carrying it around. I actually wouldn't mind using it again, and I was a little sad to lock it away in a flight case for its return to the hire company. It was nice using the big boys toys.
I got about 3 1/2 hours of standard def footage on DV cassette from the weekend. We did the whole shoot at Perry Vale Studios, which has a very nice live room which we used as our performance space for the band footage. We also used the lounge/kitchen to double as a house set for the story sections of the videos. We brought along Mark's digital projector hooked up to a DVD player to project some psychedelic coloured donuts on to the band when they played in the live room. Originally I wanted to get really creative with this aspect, and project all kinds of images and videos over the band as they played, but it required a lot more work than I was able to put in, especially as I didn't own a projector of my own. We eventually settled for some trippy visuals. I hope the effect still looks good, it should at least be a little unique. It looked really good when we filmed the close ups on the instruments and faces of the band. Close up the projections were really bright and sharp. On the wide shots with the whole band the projection was a little more dull because the projector was further away. I shot lots of takes of the band performing including closeups of each member playing the whole song, sometimes twice, to give me plenty of live footage to choose from. In the past I had just filmed the band playing and had moved around a bit myself to cover several angles in the same performance, but it always meant that I would end up just missing the best shots because I was on the move. Better to get more coverage!
One thing I'm noticing as I'm logging the footage from the DV tapes on to my computer, you really need to remind the band to stay focused and dynamic, I kept noticing that one member would have a very bored expression on his face during the multiple live footage takes, or he'd sigh or yawn or look around restlessly. Silly boy!
The story footage was a lot of fun to shoot, we cross dressed the drummer in a dress and wig for one video and slumped the guitarist on the toilet for the other.
After two long days, we finished, and I took my tapes home. My neck and shoulder still hurt, regardless of precautions.
No comments:
Post a Comment