Shoot day: 28/10/14

On our first shoot day we travelled to central London to shoot some narrative featuring Roza and her boyfriend (played by me). We also used this day to shoot one of our performance shots and some conceptual shots.

Narrative

During this shoot we captured a number of scenarios of the couple during the 'good' period of their relationship while it was going well. These shots allowed us to establish Roza's natural relationship with her boyfriend.

I am happy with these shots as they established the relationship well as well as adding to Roza's London identity.

Performance

We also used this shoot day to shoot one of Roza's performance shots. This was a shot of Roza singing with a lit up London Eye in the background. When framing this shot I ensured that our artist was the main subject of the shot without blocking out the amazing background. The bright lights contrasted with the dark sky made for a visually stunning scene. 

However some problems were encountered with this shot. Firstly, with the huge number of people on the bridge while we were shooting, it was near impossible to find the perfect positioning of the camera and artist. We also could not avoid pedestrians walking across the camera, in front of Roza. This meant that we constantly had to break up our shots and start again.

In addition to these practical problems we also faced major technical difficulties. Due to the low levels of light in the background, the camera was unable to pick up any of the shots without them being very grainy. Even after we used Adobe After Effects to increase the quality it was still nowhere near as good as the rest of our shots and looked out of place in the video.

Concept

We also shot concept shots in London, again to establish Roza's London identity. I planned to have some sort of time lapse on Oxford street, one of London's busiest locations. As a group we shot a number of different time lapses with a distant Roza staring into the camera with pedestrians and traffic flowing behind her.

The presence of London buses and black cabs really expressed the fact that Roza was a British artist however there were some problems with the shots we took. A lot of people looked blatantly into the camera when passing, some even stopping in front of it. This reduced the authenticity of the shot and meant it would be hard to find a segment that could work effectively in the video.