Kodak Awards- Popcorn Practise Shoot

We did a practise shoot before the real thing for the popcorn paper chase advert, some aspects of this went a lot better than others, if I am honest.

I'll start with what went well I guess, firstly the actors were great to work with, really responsive to what I was asking of them and were courteous at all times and understanding when we had difficulties. Realistically this is all you can ask for from them, if they give a good performance and cause no issues then there is nothing more I would want. They did this and as such they made my life easies.

The lighting set up was somewhat challenging, we struggled to get the same aesthetic we had from the practise, I now realise that this is because of the change in camera and not knowing the settings on my DSLR from the lighting test so we had no reference point to match up the two of them so when we switched from DSLR to P2 the change was not accounted for. As a result of this I again experimented with lighting, which is not at all what this shoot was for. This is probably down to the fact that out camera operator was ill, although I am in know way blaming her, I take full responsibility as I was the one who didn't trust the original lighting set up we had. However we still got some fairly decent footage for Shaun (the editor) to work with. Which he then did several cuts with but I will discuss them in a later post.

Another good thing from this shoot was that we covered lots of angles and possibilities which gave me a good idea of how I would want things to be on the real shoot and also what wasn't needed from my original plans and also in some cases what I could add. But these are more things that would be evident after the edit.

Also something we discovered that didn't go well after the shoot was the sound, we found it to be quite static filled and not very clear, in response to this we have since addressed the issue and found that instead of recording off both an boom mic and the H6 built in mic we will instead only use the boom mic as the H6 mic is poor quality. Again this only serves to highlight the importance of the digital run through so that we didn't have this problem on the real shoot.