Location Settings

The following drawing shows the space we were provided with at Sawston Village College, it shows both the stage and the auditorium in the hall. The four artists have been marked with a single black dot and the camera symbols represent the direction and position of the camera when we captured our footage. The shaddowed sections reveal the area the camera can see. Most of the shots drawn on this plan map the shot movements, we decided on these before arriving at the location because we knew these would be the trickiest to capture. Camera movements are mapped by two crosses joined with a straight line, there also some rough measurements between objects and the camera. The blocking was simple when it came to artists positioning on the stage. The famous conventional layout of an alternative rock concert is prominant in every stage music performance due to the musical requirements on a stage, this means keeping the drumkit upstage so that the vibrations can resonate with the space above the stage and doesn't drown out the sounds of the other instruments. An example of this layout is used in the final performance of 'The School of Rock' as pictured below.



The lead singer is at the front, leading the piece and the two guitarist are kept slightly upstage, either side of the singer.

Firstly, we can see the camera movements we aim to create of the lead singer.

The lead singer is positioned in the centre of the drawing above (croppped from the overal layour drawing). The two main shots we aim to create are the circular movement around the rear of the singer, which will expose the lights directed at him and the linar movement. The movement is just over 180degrees giving a chance to show the artists face whilest singing. On the day of the filming, the camera was positioned roughly 1.5metres from the artist. In order to settle with this distance we had to use time in class to judge several distances to see which was best.

The movement required two cameramen, one controlled the direction of the camera by moving the pivot so that the singer was kept in shot at all times, the other dictated the movement of the dolly; making sure the distance from the artist was constant. Overall, it gave a smooth effect and a moment of the shot is pictured below.This moment of the shot is taken from when the camera was in the position marked in the drawing. The drawing also shows several other stages of the shot to give an impression of how the face of the camera movement throughout the shot so that JJ was kept in frame.

Next, we captured the other shot shown in the drawing. It is the linear movement the moves across the front of the artist and captured the other artists performing in the background. The movement was roughly two metres long and again the face of the camera had to be altered to keep the frame correct. There is no need for direction indicators on these drawings because we captured footage by doing each shot using different directions and then judged these shots when we had uploaded our footage to the computers. We can evaluate this shot by looking at the still from the music video thats pictured below.

Our next task was to film the movement shot of the lead guitarist. Again, the artist is marked with a bold back dot, but in this shot the movement is coming towards to the artist and also being taken from a low angle (off-stage). The vertical line in the image below shows the end of the stage and the camera is on a lower level than the artist, this meant that as the camera came towards the artist, the camera operator that was controlling the direction of the lense had to alter the direction on a horizontal axis in order to keep he lead guitarists face in shot. In professional music videos a dolly might be mounted to a track, almost like a train on its line. This gives a perfectly smooth tracking shot, despite the texture of the ground. However, the dolly we used seemed to do the job as it has given a sucessful shot thats now in our rough cut. The image below shows the moment in the shot when the camera is in the position marked in the drawing.