Film Equipment

When planning the shoot for our music video, carefull consideration into what equipment should be used at what parts of the video was taken. My approach was to bring as much as possible and if at the end of the day it was not needd it doesn't matter. Better to be safe than sorry. When planning which equipment to bring, I matched our list of planned shots and went through each section invisioning the shot in my head and thought very carefully about logistic problems such as obtaining a smooth trracking shot without being able to obtain a proper dolly. To overcome this I suggested the idea that was to use my skateboard along with my friends skateboard and place the tripod on top for a 'make-shift' trolley to roll the camera across. The results prooved effective, supplying us with a nice smooth shot!

Below is a list of proffessional equipment used within music videos as well as our own and alternates:

• 1080P Sony Digital Camera

The SonyHD-50 1080p Digital Camera, was supplied by our school and was able to capture high definition film, which when tested worked perfectly for our film which was inteded to be rendered at 480p high definition for the best quality with our back up camera. Clearly it was not within our budget for the music video to purchase a top quality film camera, but this was more than acceptable for our shoot giving decent quality despite some trouble with continuity due to lighting changes.

• Camera Tripod

For our camera tripod we once more stuck with the supplied equipment from our school's media department, which I poersonally was more than pleased with. I as the designa ted filmer for the band shoot quickly got the grasps with how to handle it and adjust its height, angle and loosenes for panning and other active shots. The main trick with this was how to use this in combination with other pieces of equipment such as a height drama stage box, allowing us to get a crane view over the band. This helped a lot when looking at the finished product as there were not hand-held produced shakes in places where there are not meant to be. 

• Backup Camera

We definitely need an alternative if the world of technology decided to fail on us during our shoot, as we only had one or two potential attempts at getting the shoot done due to our actor's schedules in the future. We kept a camera with the same definition to the previous used, relying on lighting and small tweaks to be performed on Adobe Premier after.

• External Microphone

An external microphone is something many people decide to bring for capturing sounds within the video itself, however within our planning of the video we had not decided to use any of these sounds as the sound is being played from a seperate track over our video and we had worked hard on ensuring clean syncing with it. Addiitonally an external microphone of sufficient quality was hard to pick up at our level, if we did decide to use extrnal recordings of sound, our current film camera was more than acceptable.