JP-Evaluation of shoot (Bluewater and Greenhithe)

On Tuesday 3rd of November, Mitch, Dom, Jonny and I all drove to bluewater to shoot some key scenes for our music video. We were going to use the car parks as a location to gain an urban effect which conforms to our music video ideas. Obviously Bluewater shopping centre is a popular attraction which hundreds of people use so we needed to decide on a time for shooting our scenes. After discussion, we decided to meet in the car-park at ten o’clock so not many people and cars were there.

We began shooting in the John Lewis car park on the top level, the lighting was superb for the image we were trying to achieve. All in all our shoots were very successful, looking at them on a computer screen allowed us to see just how good our shots turned out. Each and every member of the group is extremely pleased with how it went and the outcome is perfect. At first we were concerned with the lighting because obviously we chose to shoot in the dark so we didn’t have the advantage of sunlight. Instead we had to use our own source of lighting E.g. car headlights, street lights etc. After we had achieved what we wanted at bluewater we felt we had enough time and the weather was just right for us to then drive to Greenhithe castle to complete some of our other key scenes there.

Things that went well

The quality of our shots turned out very well, we had the opportunity to get a lot of our shots done and we did. One of our big worries was that there might still be cars and people in the car park but in the end it was completely empty which meant there were no distractions of stoppages in our filming. Another worry at the beginning of the day was the weather. During the afternoon of Tuesday it was raining heavily and it was extremely cold, luckily for us, by the evening the weather cleared up and it was perfect to shoot in. The lighting was also a success, it is easy to see our faces throughout and the backgrounds look great in the dark with just the right amount of light. In a way we found it a good thing that it rained during the day because by the evening most of it had cleared up bar a few puddles which was very beneficial because the light reflected off the puddles to create a nice effect.

Things that didn’t go so well

Even though most of our shoot went well there were one or two things that didn’t quite go to plan. At time during the shoot the lights were turned off in the car park but luckily they came back on again a few minutes later. The framing was a difficult task at times but we feel that we overcame this and were able to get some really good shots.