Reflection on Southend Filming

Today we visited Leigh-On-Sea and Hadleigh castle to do some extra filming for our music video. Whilst we were there we got a lot of great footage but we did make a few filming mistakes.

Great Improvised Shots:

• Because we went filming with no real idea as to what shots we wanted to get it opened us up to some amazing, improvised filming possibilities which was really exciting and fun for everyone.
• Shots like this one were purely improvised after we saw the water and the pylons under the bridge whilst walking past. Once we had an idea of what we would do we set up and started filming. The result was a visually stunning tracking shot of the artist walking through the water which serves as a great way to the start the music video.

Another example of fun and improvised filming was our trip to Hadleigh Castle. We went to Southend to film in Leigh on Sea and expected to stay filming there for the entire time we were out but after seeing a map that featured the castle we decided to take a trip down there in the hope that we would get some cool shots; and we did.

The castle and the land were amazing and provided many different shot ideas and camera angles, like this circular tracking shot we filmed inside the castle ruins itself.

What went wrong?:

This was a shot idea that came out of nowhere and was completely improvised in the moment. Two members of our group saw that the train was about to pass and rushed us to set up and film our artist in front of the passing train.
It would have been a great shot if it wasn't for a few silly mistakes. As you can see from the shot below, we accidentally got shadows in the shot which distracts the audience away from the artist thus ruining the shot.
Secondly, because we rushed setting up and didn't have time to focus before the train passed, our artist can be seen smiling and laughing before going into character but at that point the shot was almost over and the train had almost completely passed.