Filming Day Two

Today was our second day of filming, and we filmed with both our actors today.  We got more done then we had planned for as we found ourselves with more time to travel into London to film some shots we needed from there.

Originally we had planned to film between 9am and 12pm, but due to Ted's later plans being cancelled we were able to film until about 3pm. Along with the train shots we had planned to do, we were also able to film the bridge shots and the ripping up of the map. This has given us a lot more footage that we can edit together next week in school.

Track List

Earlier today, Rachel and I took a bit of time to think of the list of songs we're going to feature on our digipak later this year. Here's a rough list of what we came up with:

As 'Don't Get Me Wrong' is the song we've chosen to make our music video to, this was an obvious choice for the song list. We've also added another genuine song by The Pretenders ('Holy Commotion'). Not only is this a great song, but also the track we used in our film opening last year! The other songs are ones we've made up, a couple are based off other genuine songs from other artists.

'Letters to Amsterdam' is a take on Chris Rea's 1979 song 'Cenotaph/ Letters from Amsterdam', and 'The Ballad of ...' is something we decided to use as it's a popular style of song title, examples including 'The Ballad of John and Yoko' (The Beatles) and 'The Ballad of Perry Smith' (Bastille).

Band Name

For our band name, we have decided to go with... The Porcupines!

There were a few factors which influenced this decision. Firstly, as the song is by a band called The Pretenders, we thought we'd pay homage to this by also using The P.... Having a band name with 'The' at the start is not uncommon for a band of this genre and era, for example, The Beatles, The Clash, The Rolling Stones, and many many others. Another reason we decided to go with The Porcupines is the use of the animal name. Again, many artists choose to use animal names in their name, The Beatles, The Animals, and more recently, Arctic Monkeys are just a few examples.

With these factors in mind, we narrowed it down to The Porcupines!

Filming Day One

Today we finally started filming! Later than would have liked to due to illness and bad weather but we've started nonetheless. There were a couple of issues with filming in stations and using a tripod which we've spoken about in the blog below.

Creating Animations

After doing some research into different animating software, we've decided to go with Adobe After Effects. I had a look into also using Photoshop as this is what I was suggested by illustrator Maddy Vian, but I think After Effects is going to be more suitable for exactly what we want. This video tutorial for how to use the animation/ scribble effect is really helpful, and I think we'll use this as a step-by-step guide when it comes to actually adding the animations.

Forgetting the Plate

When we got to filming yesterday, we quickly realised that we had a tripod and phone clip but no plate to attach them with. As a quick fix we used a piece of ribbon we Rachel had on her to tie the phone and clip to the tripod.

This worked surprisingy well and kept the phone really steady, but it has remindind us that we need to be more prepared when we film our final footage! We are, however, keeping the ribbon attached to the tripod as we might use it as reinforcements when we film.

Practice Shots

As we have planned to film quite a few shots on trains and tubes, we decided to go out and test out different lines to see which is the smoothest as a way to reduce shaky footage and reshoots.

On Monday, we spent a couple of hours filming on both the overground and underground to see where we would get the steadiest shots. Luckily for us it was more successful than we anticipated; both went well so we could film on either, but we've decided to go ahead with the overground for the opening and closing shots,and the underground for the single shots during the montage section of the video.

As the video shows, both the trains and the tubes were pretty steady.