Weather and Filming

As previously blogged, our group decided that Grovelands park should be our next filming location. Having found it increasingly difficult to decide on a date to film because of the ever changing weather conditions, we knew to put a few dates a side, as we had a feeling that a potential lack of sunlight or rainy conditions would stop us from getting out and filming. Both dates fell on a friday morning, the first planned filming day was Friday 29th November, however as feared, the night before's weather report revealed a rainy and dark morning ahead, so minor set back, we decided to hold back and wait for another day, rather than waste our time seeking the light that just wasn't available.
So Friday 6th December has become our next contestant! We're all hoping to get out that day, because we fear December is rapidly disappearing and I know as a group, we're definitely keen on getting the bulk of our footage before we come back next year after Christmas. We shall be glued to the weather updates and hope for the best.

This image of Grovelands, would definitely be the best scenario to wake up to on Friday!

Our outfits and the importance of consistency

Having begun planning our next filming date, which weather depending will be Friday next week, it's important we consider consistency throughout the music video regarding our outfit choices of our first Alexandra Palace filming day. With this in mind, I thought I'd do a quick blog post on our outfit choices of that day, which were not just completely random and spontaneous. Before filming, we'd discussed as a group that we wanted our clothes to reflect a 90's vibe, so a kind of cool, casual and laid back feeling, perhaps to reflect the indie rock sound of our song. During this discussion we were envisioning plenty of denim, big hair, bright colours, however it is honest to say that the 5.30am start of the first filming date most definitely saw the end of the well thought out hairstyles, accessories and makeup, instead we simply turned up in our outfits that thankfully we did pre plan and we set to filming. Interestingly without the overly 'done' look the footage actually turned out looking very laid back but yet still reflected a very casual 90's vibe, which we were actually very pleased with. 

Here's some images that we'd looked at before planning our own outfits, it is fair to say we were all a bit alarmed at the colours and side pony tails, so our early start was almost a blessing in disguise, I believe it enabled us to get just the right balance. 

And our outfits...

Rachel chose to wear baggy jeans
paired with black platform boots

Rachel chose a white crop top inspired by the 90's theme

Sinead paired a denim jacket with a tartan shirt, channeling a more rocky 90's vibe, paired with Doc Martens

Anna went for a more flowery and girly look

Similar to Sinead, I also went for a denim jacket paired with a black
jumper, tights and black boots. 

Practice; Album Artwork

So this week we were challenged to make our own album cover, with the help of Pete's blog and his genius steps that made the whole process rather entertaining..

My randomly generated Wikipedia article was 'Tom Forrester' which to be honest, I was quite happy with due to it being a name and therefore easily reflective of a band/artist

My album title, according to the last four words on this quotation website; 'eat until he eats them' which I'm not entirely sure how I feel about, but we'll just pass it off as 'quirky indie'

Having to choose the third image on flickr caused me to end up with a cat in an alley way as my album artwork.

I then used Picmonkey to edit the image, placing the text that I had over it in order to create my album artwork

This is my final album artwork and overall I'm actually quite pleased with it, somehow the image of the pouncing cat reflects the album title 'eat until he eats them' perhaps suggesting some sort of evil hungry pouncing cat. This task has highlighted how easy it is to produce an album cover if you are creative as to where you look for inspiration, having not had followed Pete's random steps, I would be for sure still thinking long and hard over what theme of image to use. It's also made me aware how important branding is and ensuring that although this task was random, that our final product does reflect our music sound and audience we are targeting.

Potential Filming Location

Having uploaded all of our footage from Alexandra  Palace and thankfully all  being very pleased with it, it has, however highlighted how many empty spaces we are yet to fill!
With this is mind, we need to consider what's next on the agenda, because as difficult as it is to admit it to ourselves, our morning filming has most certainly not completed our film, that it seems, would be far too easy.
The other day Anna suggested a potential filming location of Grovelands Park. With its wide open spaces, central lake with numerous bridges, as well as hilly landscape at times, we definitely began envisioning scenes for our music video. Furthermore as we have previously stated, unlike last year, we hope to make this years filming locations far more accessible, in order to allow us the freedom to continually retake the shot, ultimately gaining the best quality, without the pressure of worrying that we'd be caught or moved on. Grovelands park would allow us to do this and we believe that the open spaces allow a sense of freedom that is perhaps reflective of our unplanned and carefree nature of our music video.

Here's some images of Grovelands Park we found whilst we were talking about potentially using it as a location...

Seen as we're moving swiftly towards serious winter, we'd definitely need to arrange a filming day soon, in an attempt to catch a bright day, particularly as our Alexandra Palace weather conditions were sunny. Hopefully potentially using these wide open spaces will create crisp clear shots for our music video. 

Looking at the footage

In this vlog...
Having uploaded all of our Alexandra  Palace footage onto iMovie today, we thought we'd record a short group vlog after having watched our footage for the first time. We're happy to say that we are still very pleased with the footage we got!

Wednesday's Filming..

Just a few pictures we took on Wednesday morning whilst filming, the top image was when we believed we'd in fact missed the sunrise and were all rather irritated at the thought of it being a waste of time. However we soon woke up and realized that we were actually missing it and quickly ran up high and luckily managed to film the whole sun rise. We most probably wont use all that footage but we wanted to ensure we left the camera on the tripod just rolling and filming the entire sun rise, where perhaps we may create some sort of a time lapse. 

 Whilst the camera was rolling filming the sunrise, Anna went to take pictures on her phone to then be made aware of this really great silhouette effect lighting due to the sun rising in the back round. As we have previously blogged about, we wanted to incorporate a silhouette effect into our music video, so to pretty much unexpectedly get perfect silhouette lighting was very exciting. So we filmed all four of us in the same position, marked by our bags creating a box, facing sideways and singing the first few verse of our song, definitely scared a few joggers in the process but we were definitely all in high spirits as we were so happy with the potential of how these shots may look.

As you can the see the weather was absolutely perfect for filming, although very cold, which almost made it better due to the crisp weather, we could often see our breath in the shots, which we thought was a good effect. This is just an action shot, where you can see Rachel standing in our make shift box singing the first few verses of Haim, furthermore our previous lip syncing practice taught us to sing rather than mime, so that is what we did and hopefully all the shots are successful!