R&P Post 32: Test shoot and rough edit

The test shoot has been an essential part of our pre-production/construction cross over stage in the production of our music video as it has allowed us to see our ideas come to life. Below is a picture of the schedule for the week (I am a member of group 2 - coloured green).

Our Test Shoot schedule

We were able to create our lighting set ups, finalise our set design ideas and see how the costume, hair and make-up looked in the studio (pictures of which can be seen below).

Our Doll's House Set-Up

Me in my land-girls costume, hair and make-up

We also used our studio time to film all the shots we had decided on in our shoot board as well as some experimental ones. When doing our rough cut we decided that we needed more shots with camera movement to create a more visually interesting and engaging music video so therefore next week in our main shoot we will experiment and use the dolly.

We had to make sure that all of our pre-production was done by the beginning of this week to allow us to film all the shots with all the props we needed. For example, we finished wallpapering and making the dwarfs in the lessons on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Below is our rough cut:

Because we had no time between our test shoot week and our main shoot week, we only did a rough cut for the first part of our song.

Things we learnt from our Test Shoot and Rough Cut:

1. Allocate longer periods of time rather than 5/10 minutes per shot as this decreases the time pressure and allows us to have more flexibility whilst still getting everything done in our allocate time per set-up
2. Make sure our set ups are all different- we achieved this through set design, costume, characterisation of GiGi in my performance and lighting colours.
3. Make sure GiGi was sufficiently lit- for example in some Snow White and 1950's Housewife scenes I looked red and yellow respectively from the background colours.
4. A key thing we learnt was that we need multiple takes of each shot type and the split between lip-sync and 'poses' in order to give us enough editing possibilities and cutaways.
5. We want to create a visually interesting music video through incorporating conventions such as beauty shots and cutting to the beat.
6. We learnt how long lighting takes to set up but now that we have saved our lighting set ups as 'memories' in the studio on the lighting desk, in main shoot we will just have to adjust the position of the lights accordingly rather than having to choose which coloured gels we would have for which light. 
7. In regards to costume and make-up, we were happy with all the costumes but wanted to have more stand-out make-up for puppet and a brighter purple lipstick for performance.

In the Puppet Set-Up we had a problem with the make-up and string which we were able to fix quickly:

Puppet Set-Up during the Test Shoot

In this set-up we decided that we needed to improve the make-up so in the main shoot we will use a face-painting sponge to make the white cover my face better and used lipstick to make the circles on my cheek stand out more. We found that the string was not that visible on camera so in the main shoot we made it thicker by looping it over the rigging more times.

Overall, I am quite pleased with the test shoot and rough cut as it allowed us to see what we were doing well and what we should change in the main shoot to allow us to create the best music video we can. Below is a picture of the list of teacher feedback we received:

Teacher Feedback

We also received some target audience feedback which helped us identify what we could improve in the main shoot:

Target Audience Feedback

I also thought that it would be important to get feedback from a member of our tertiary audience to see what a member of a different age group thought of our video:

Tertiary audience feedback

Overall, all the different types of feedback were useful in order to make changes for our main shoot and in our edit.