Action!

On Monday we set out to do the main bulk of our filming for our group project. This is the story of our day filming...

We set off first thing in the morning and headed down the M4 to meet Ed at his house and head into Guildford and to ACM. After a quick cuppa and meeting Ed's dog we jumped into the car and made our way to ACM.

This is where we encountered our first problem, the woman who was meant to give us permission to film was ill. This meant we could still film but we couldn't get any of the exterior shots or anything containing logo's or much of the interior. We were allowed in a rehearsal room though which was where we spent some time filming 2 members of the choir Ricky and Emily.

We got some footage of them rehearsing a duet they had been working on which will be useful when it comes to reflecting on the choir members, this took quite some time and we probably wont end up using much of it but it does make good footage. The 2nd part of our time with them was an interview with them focusing on similar questions that we had written to ask music director Mark, this will prove more useful as we can use soundbites of their interview.

After this we headed over to Croydon to Mark's house, we chose to film here rather at ACM as it gives a more personal up close approach to the interview and being that the documentary is effectively his story we though it would be better. As it turned out his living room was all neutral colours and had good lighting which made a very good 'studio' for the filming.

During filming we had 2 cameras and one tripod. The way we set this up was to have one static camera, and one camera moving and changing angles to provide what we hope will make 'arty' shots for the interview sections. If we were to do it again we definitely would take a boom microphone to get better quality audio from the interviews to use as narration.

Though it may not seem like we did much we got a lot of useful footage and it is most of our filming done. Ed will go back in the next couple of weeks to film a quick few exterior shots, and we are hoping that the footage Ed took before will show up after being deleted off the computers.

On top of this we have plenty of archive footage to work with which will probably be included in the opening section of the documentary.

Though it was a long day filled with service station food and rush hour London traffic it was a very productive, useful and fun day!