Account of shoot day

The day started of by use arriving at Battersea Powerstation and being ‘suited and booted’ with safety equipment. After this, we were then given a health and safety talk by the onsite manager. This was particular exciting as we nervously listened to the amount of dangers and diseases that were present on the site.

After this was finished, we then went to the north side of the powerstation, accompanied by two security guards. Although it was pretty daunting being looked upon all the time, it gave the whole day a professional atmosphere.

As the director of the day, I had to quickly run over the storyboards in order to refresh my memory and visualize the shots in the space. Luckily, from photos and research, I was able to draw out the exact location on the storyboards so I had some idea on how it would look. However, the one thing that was unpredictable was the weather. With the previous shoot dates cancelled due to snow and bad weather, we were lucky enough to have a pleasant, sunny day with little interferences with clouds. After doing a test shot with the camera however, I felt that lighting on the face and body wasn’t enough, so we decided to use a gold reflector. This casted a gold glow upon the artist which was intended to develop his star character as a important and almost ‘God’ like figure. Catrina took control of the reflector during shots.

We shot the song in order, going from location to location in the powerstation.

We started by setting up the tracking along the north side of the building, having the powerstation in the background. Due to the location – it being a building site- it took many attempts in order to get a steady tracking shot. However, after persistence, we managed to get one. We then varied these tracking shots with close ups, and simple stationary shots. I wanted this in order to have a selection to choose from when editing.