BWB - Reflection on London shoot

When where and who?
On Friday 13th Me, Ollie, Freddie and Luca (Cast) travelled up to London to film the bulk of our footage which we wish to emulate in our final piece. We departed at London Bridge and made our way over to Southwark. When we arrived the weather was awful, the skies were grey and the rain was torrential. Instead of wasting time waiting for the rain to stop we decided to go to Tate modern and film some footage which was not originally on the shot list. After filming in here for about 45 minutes, the rain cleared up and we began to film throughout Southbank.

My role in Production
I was the main actor throughout the video. The task was relatively simple as I created a detailed shot list and we had the animatic up on youtube which I could follow. The main challenges I faced was working into big crowds to achieve the crowd shots and choreographing a dance routine in a built up area infront of a large audience.

How useful was the shot list?
I spent a lot of time in creating the shot list before we left to go to London. The time was proven to be well spent as it helped us organise and maintain clarity of our shots throughout the day, ticking off each shot as we completed it. We could constantly refer back to the call sheet at any point of the day to see how much more we had to film, what point we were at, and what acting/ camera position was required. However the shot list was not used at the beginning of the day when we improvised and filmed in an internal location due to the bad weather.

What where your best shots?
We managed to achieve an excellent panning shot whilst at Tate modern. Ollie, Freddie and Luca all stood on the balcony a good 20-30M high, whilst I was down below in a courtyard. The footage see's me walking away from the building and towards the river, as I get further away the camera pans upwards and slowly zooms really optimising the view of London and making full use of the clear blue skies. In addition to this other good shots included the action match shot of the camera panning down from the sky to an other the shoulder shot of me leaning over the bridge and the high angle shot of me walking with a large crowd of people.

 Any problematic shots?
We had some problems with some of the simple over the shoulder shots due to zoom on the camera. It meant for many of the shots the cameraman would have to stand a few metres further back to make sure the characters where in frame. However we dealt with this issue well and made full use of the day in London.