Filming Process

During the filming process of our music video, we didn’t keep to a straight structure of what should be filmed on certain days and so we decided to film whenever our whole group could. We thought that this would be best due to the short amount of time we had to film everything. We also found that it was important to be flexible with this process as it took a long time to take all the pictures needed for the stop motion, so we had to take our time and not rush with this.

We decided upon using locations that could easily be accessed so we could film as much stop motion as possible in the area. We used the school grounds as this was readily available to us and we also used the streets located around the school. We also used more rural areas, such as the Roaches, in order to fully capture the length and scale of the letter’s journey. The main reason for local locations was the time limit that we had and also the lack of transport we had as a group. We were determined to not rely on people's schedules as we did not want to get behind and lose time on the editing process. However, we tried not to make our locations too repetitive and boring and so using places such as The Roaches and The Rudyard Track created more variety in the shots. This made it more interesting as well and it further indicated the length of the journey for the letter. Using more rural locations enhanced the idea of isolation for the letter as well, therefore creating a deeper meaning of the relationship becoming distant. This allowed the letter to represent a metaphor of the relationship, suggesting the relationship is fully broken when the girl throws the letter from the cliff and as she climbs to the higher ground.

 

It took us roughly three weeks to film the entire music video, which is relatively short considering the amount of work that was created in the time limit. The majority of this time was spent taking photos of the letter to create the stop motion sequence. During the filming process we took thousands of photos as well as gaining a decent amount of moving footage.

During the filming process, one of the biggest problems we experienced was lighting. Because the majority of our stop motion footage was taken outside, we found that the light tended to change in every shot. However, from looking at the photos, this is not as noticeable in some shots and in others we thought it actually looked quite effective. Another problem we experienced was the weather. As we were trying to stick the letter to the ground or onto objects, the wind tended to move the paper which made to difficult to shoot as we needed to maintain the continuity of the letter’s movements to make the stop motion flow smoothly.