Filming

Overall, I feel that the filming of my music video went pretty well; the friends who agreed to act out the different parts for me took direction from me and listened to my ideas and suggestions. As I wanted to film the first few shots in a bar, I went to a local pub and asked the landlady if I could shoot a few scenes at the bar: she said I was more than welcome as long as I did not get her in any of the shots! I was also aware that I could not film members of the public without their permission, so I avoided filming when there were other people in the vicinity. My two friends (Ellen and Michael), who featured throughout, were extremely helpful as both gave up a lot of time to help me with my filming. They also provided different locations for me: I filmed some shots at each of their houses to add verisimilitude to the back story of my music video idea (I needed to show them in many different places). However, I found the mise en scene quite hard to do for each shot as I needed the characters to be wearing different clothes for the 'past' and 'present' scenes. This was particularly important as I wanted it to be clear to the audience that time had progressed between Michael's 'memories' and the reality.

During the time in which I had planned to film I went to London and decided that this would be a good chance to film the motorway traffic which I needed for the instrumental parts of the song. I filmed at three different stages of the day, early afternoon, dusk and evening so that I had three different times to choose from. I feel that this part of the filming went particularly well as in central London there is a lot of traffic and I hope that this footage captures the bustling crowds and busy streets as I envisioned them for these shots. I also took the opportunity to film the River Thames, as well as some other well known landmarks during the evening. I will try and use at some point in my film as these are also common themes which occur in many existing music videos.