Music Video Filming Blog

 In our previous blog, I sketched up a storyboard to guide my filming for my music video.  I discussed how the song I am using is Boulevard of Broken Dreams and that it is a Grunge song.  The majority of the storyboard sections were used to illustrate establishing shots and the important climax scene where the dog gets stolen.  Before going into filming, I knew the climax scene would be the hardest to film.

My role in filming was to be the actor.  Nicholas took up the other roles.  Before the twenty second walking scene, establishing shots had to be filmed.  We filmed shots of the road with and without the actors, the sky, and me walking out of the house with the dog.  The dog used in the blog was a Goldendoodle, not a Labradoodle as I had previously stated.  In preparation for shooting, we took time to scout out a road suitable for the scene.  That meant the road had to have little traffic, long length, and room for camera operators.  To make the scene easier to replicate incase we did it wrong the first time, we placed sticks in the road and on the side of the road to mark where the cameras would shoot from and where the actions of the scene would happen.  Also before shooting the big scene, I asked for more help from my family members because we needed more than two people.  Before the acting, we set up three different camera angles to capture the scene from.  On was from behind to capture me walking into the setting.  One was from the front, to capture my anguished expression after the dog got stolen.  The last one was from the side of the road perpendicular to where the action of stealing the dog would take place.  The purpose of the third angle was to capture slow motion footage of the action.  However, we may not use the slow motion footage.  

The most difficult part of filming the long scene with the climax was the dog.  This was due to the dog becoming more and more frightened by the scene the more we tried it.  Also, it was hard to make the dog walk in the direction we wanted and where we wanted him to.  In the end, the scene took multiple takes.  This was because we were testing out different methods of making the action look realistic.  Ultimately, however, we ended up using the very first take because the dog looked most natural in it and it met all our criteria for the scene.