Week 8 Blog (3/2/16)

I wanted to wait to do this week’s blog until after our film shoot Wednesday evening.

Well everything is going very well. We finally have a few locations to film at. Last night we filmed at one of the drummer’s house. And we even got permission from Jengo’s to film there later this month. It took a while for the ball to start rolling, but now we are excited to continue working on this film.

As for Wednesday, we got there and started setting up around 4pm. It took us an hour to set up everything. We had a tone of equipment that Eli had brought. We had at least two of everything, which I thought was a bit excessive. We ended up using most of the equipment. We used five cameras, and used two LSD lights. I helped with sound recording since Simone stayed in class yesterday. I had set up one H4N recorder, and luckily I have taken the sound recording class, so I know how to use the equipment. The batteries in the H4N were low when I first started them up, but luckily we had a 2nd H4N with batteries in them, so I was able to swap them out. For filming, we let each drummer come onto the set and start drumming/jamming. We let them do what ever they wanted, because this was a part of the drum solos section in our film. In this section, we want to highlight the talent of these drummers. We filmed four drummers last night, and we gave each one three takes to show off their skills. Each take was roughly 3-7 minutes, except one take which was 21 minutes because the drummer was “feeling the vibe” and we did not want to interrupt him. They all were incredible! They are all very talented and I am really happy they can be a part of our video. After everyone was done, we wrapped up and left just before 9pm.

It was great to finally be able to film something. We had such a long gab in between pre-production and production, that our group was getting a bit worried. It was smart that we filmed the solos first, because it allowed both the drummers and ourselves to ease into filming this project. If we had started filming with a group of drummers, there would have been a whole lot of chaos.