Risk Assessment

Jack and I thought that it would be a good idea to do a risk assessment of the music video and all te locations we filmed in. Take a look below to see it.

MC Productions: Risk Assessment

Location: All locations

Hazard: Crash whilst driving

Avoidance: Ensure that the driver of the car has a full UK license and that they follow all precautionary driving methods to ensure that passengers in the car, other drivers and pedestrians are safe.

Location: Editing suite

Hazard: Tripping hazards of cables

Avoidance: Make sure that all wires are either placed neatly round the edge of the room or tape the wires down to prevent tripping.

Location: Ashdown Forest

Hazard: The rain

Avoidance: To make sure that when filming, an umbrella was placed over the camera to prevent any damage to our expensive piece of equipment.

Location: Trinity Theatre

Hazard: Many

Avoidance: during our time here, there were many risks but as it is a professional establishment, they have taken into consideration all the possible risk assessments and made sure that they are safe. We also had to complete one of Trinity’s Risk assessments for our time there as it is part of their legal contract.

Location: Ashdown Forest

Hazard: Tripping

Avoidance: As all the ground is unsteady, we took extra care when walking over the unsteady ground to make sure that we did not trip over when performing a tracking shot or when we were walking.

Location: Leeds Castle

Hazard: Falling in the river

Avoidance: To make sure we did not fall in, we were extra careful when walking next to the river.

Location: Leeds Castle

Hazard: The Public

Avoidance: When filming backwards, we would communicate with each other to make sure we were not bumping into members of the public.

Location: Brighton

Hazard: The stones

Avoidance: When walking on the stones we made sure we were careful by waking slowly and looking where we were going.

Location: Editing suite

Hazard: Electrical malfunction

Avoidance: All our electrical equipment has been PAC tested to the electrical standard which made sure that all the equipment was safe to use.

Location: All locations

Hazard: Car safety

Avoidance: To make sure that the car we were driving was safe to use, we made sure that the car had a full MOT and service and all repairs had been made before setting off to our locations.

Location: All locations

Hazard: Camera safety

Avoidance: To make sure our expensive Cannon 7D was safe, we made sure that we used a top of the range Velbon Tripod, as this is a well known brand and is made to a high quality so we could be sure the camera would be safe and sturdy whilst connected to our tripod.

From reviewing all these hazards, this made us aware of all the possible things that could go wrong and made our project safe with no dangers occurring. From reviewing the hazards before filming in the location, it made the filming and editing, a safe experience for us both.

Trip to the Theatre

I thought it would be a good ide to reveal more about the trip we made to the Trinity Theatre in Tunbridge Wells to film the performance based section of our music video, and how we came about securing the theatre for the afternoon.

Last summer Jack was lucky enough to do his work experience at the theatre and became good friends with the managers. This allowed him to ask them nicely if we could use the stage for one afternoon and have control of the sound and the lighting as well. Seeing as Jack did Technical Lighting as his work experience then this was easy for Jack to arrange and we knew we could get some really good effects with the lights going on as Jack had a fair idea of what he was doing.

The day went really well and I was really pleased with the outcome of the footage we shot, we knew that we had to get on with it as soon as we got there and that's exactly what we did. We arrived and got straight on stage and it didn't take us long to get the desired effect with the lights, and we did inf act get out of the theatre earlier than planned and managed to get a couple of hours of editing in that day as well, so in terms of time management, things went really smoothly that day.

Things are really starting to come together now and the music video, the digipak and the poster are all more or less done, so now it's just a case of tying everything together.

Location List & Filming

It's been a very busy, but interesting and productive few weeks! We've got a huge amount of filming done and now have a total of FOUR different locations to put in our video, which beats last years foundation production which had one location in which was in the school grounds!

Firstly, I should state that we have decided to call out artist James Thompson, we felt that this was very British name, which went in keep with our portfolio built around Michael Buble, but I will add another blog post looking into the representations we want to create for our artist as well.

Below I have listed all of the locations we went to and have put some screen grabs in as well so you can get an idea of what we've done.

Trinity Theatre

One of the locations we used was a local theatre, which we were very lucky to have access to as Jack did a week of work experience there. This was where we did all of our lip syncing, as we decided we wouldn't overload the video with lip syncing and would only use the live performance shots as lip syncing shots. We wanted to make the music video look as if it was a live performance, with a side story in between shots of the 'live performance'. To achieve the desired effect we asked the lighting technician of the theatre to do the best he could to make the stage look like a music concert stage. Take a look at some of the screen grabs below, which show us adding a purply type hugh to the stage, as we felt this was most effective in making it look like a 'live' performance.

Ashdown Forest

Our second location we chose was Ashdown Forest in Kent, as we thought it would be good to use this dark, sombre location at the beginning of the song, before the jazzy saxophones kick in and before the song becomes more upbeat and happy. Luckily, it was snowing on the day that we drove over there so the shots worked even better. We also made all of these shots black and white so that it looked even more downbeat. Again, take a look below at a couple of screen grabs.

Brighton Pier

Out third location was maybe a little but cliche, but at the same time we knew it would work, and it was Brighton. A huge majority of the Media videos that we watched use Brighton Pier, and in a way i was rather reluctant to go there, but there are some shots that can become very effective there, and that's why we chose to go ahead with it. Take a look at some our screen-grabs below!

Leeds Castle

Lastly, we thought it would be good to go and film in a more glamorous location, which really supported Jame's image of a quite well off posh person. The location we chose to go to was Leeds Castle in Maidstone. This has some stunning grounds and it was a really nice day as well, so this worked to our advantage massively, and this was one of my favourite days of filming as we got some fantastic shots, and also some shots for our digipak as well. Screen-grabs are below.

Overall I'm really pleased with the progress we've made, and things are really starting to come together! :)

I'm currently working on the poster, whilst Jack works on the digipak. More posts to follow soon!

Shooting Schedule

In terms of time management, I knew from last year that we could vastly improve on this. So to achieve it, Jack and I decided to create some filmign schedules to help us move along more swiftly and know where we had to eb and whe. follow the links below to see our schedules.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/139715396/MC-Productions-Shooting-Schedule

http://www.scribd.com/doc/139716155/MC-Productions-Shooting-Schedule-2

This massivley helped us in terms of organisation, as we both imported the schedules onto our phones so that we both knew what we had to do and when we had to do it.