Step 3 Filming
Hello and welcome to welcome to my videography blog: Video Pro with Andrew Tregoning.
In these series of posts I'm outlining how to make a music video if you're a total noob and have practically no budget.
In these series of posts I'm outlining how to make a music video if you're a total noob and have practically no budget.
Before the day of the shoot make sure you know your track inside and out back to front, make sure you’ve performed it out-loud numerous times, because when you get in front of a camera, the human brain sometimes just randomly goes into sleep mode for some reason.
Performing to camera is hard!
Performing to camera is hard!
You must over perform, the camera subtracts 50% of your emoting and gesturing and facial expressions, so go OTT!
Get a battery powered boombox or iPod with earphones if you’ve got long hair and can hide them or battery powered speakers that connect to your phone so you can hear your track and keep time with it. Now get ready for a bunch of 'make sure's'... Make sure it’s fully charged for the day.
Make sure you have lots of SD cards to store all the footage on and spare fully charged batteries for the camera.
Make sure you have food and drink and warm clothes.
Make sure you have the aforementioned script and schedule, and that you follow it, ticking off things as you go. The worst thing is getting to step 4 - editing and realising you’ve missed a bit and you have to go out and shoot it again.
The way I film performance shoots is I film an entire take all the way through four or five times, this way you can cut in-between the dodgy bits and you know for sure that you’ve got full coverage of all parts of the song.
Composing or setting up a shot is a bit of an artform, some people just get it, but if you don’t you can learn, watch a load of other music videos that you like and sketch out where they place the the subject in the frame and try and copy that, also google ‘the rule of thirds’.
Camera bag
- camera
- batteries, charged, with charger
- sd cards, backed up
- lens
Equipment bag
- laptop, charged, with charger
- tripod if needed for shoot
- water, sandwiches
- phone charger, earphones
- speakers
- travel tickets
Shots needed
- performance shots in at least 4 different set ups
- Extensive B roll of these areas
- whatever narrative has been agreed
- Extensive B roll of the narrative shot’s locations
And that’s it, go out and have fun! Thanks for reading step 3, now good luck with step 4...