Final Assignment: Filming

After my koto ( Japanese tradtional musical instrument ) practise, I rushed to the playroom to set up the equipment for the shoot. Zhiyun and Wang yi worked together to set up the green screen while Rae and I put up the camera and lights. I read a lot of tutorials online the night before about setting up lighting for the green screen and tried my best to create even lighting for the green screen so that editing would be very much easier when we get down to it. We were quite efficient as everything was done before the cast arrived at 12 pm.

We arranged the shoot such that those who finish their parts the most quickly and more efficiently would get to leave earlier. We have some alumni from the previous years and some of the students from other parts of NUS amongst the cast. This is because this is not just an FASS project, but a NUS one. Thankfully everyone was very co-operative and waited patiently for their turn for their section of the video.

The first part of the filming process was to record the sounds that we will re-mix into a beatbox. Everyone was running out of ideas of what kind of sounds to make and we ended up with a lot of possible sounds. Then we proceeded with the scenes for the rap. We got the people to lip sync to the rap because we figured that it would be very tough for them to memorise the rhythm and rhyme of the rap well.

Jia xiang was present too, because we contacted him earlier for him to appear in our video, as well as to check if we are doing things right. Although we did warn and tell our friends to avoid wearing colours such as white, yellow or green , which will make them 'disappear'into the green screen, he was concerned about some of the props that we were using.

In one of the scenes, we got one of our friends to play a guitar in the background. The guitar, as most guitars do, has a glossy surface and Jia xiang told us that it might disappear when we do 'green screen removal' on the video editing software. My group thought about it and decided to continue filming with the guitar as it was an essential part of the video. Editing might be a lot more tidious but we believe it is worth it.

We also changed several scenes such that a lot of the props would be replaced by computer graphics. For example, Nilar was supposed to 'push' a real book off her head. But we did a few takes and it just looked weird and thus we decided to use computer graphics for this shot. We did the same for some other takes as well.

At the same time that we were doing this filming, we had a very innovative and creative idea. Throughout the whole shoot, we had a little DV camera at the corner of the room, capturing our whiole filming process. We plan to use this footage as part of our CNM video.

Utilising the time for one video shoot to do two, I thought that was really pretty ingenious. Nevertheless, we are still worred as to how the video will turn out. I never knew that video filming for such a short video would take so much time. In the end, we filmed for 7 hours and left the playroom only at 830 pm after clearing up the place.