Shoot 17/11/14

This shoot was an after school session until 9:00pm. As we had about 5 hours straight to film, we decided to get all the shots for the balloon scene done in one go. 

We began setting up in our free periods during the day by setting up the lights and blowing up the rest of the balloons. During this time we realised that the mushroom prop made of balloons that we had planned wasn't going to work out as we couldn't get it to stand up and were worried that the balloons would bust under the hot lights. In its place, we decided to cut out and paint some card in the shape of mushrooms to hang up in a similar way we did with the giant playing cards. We thought that this would look better while still creating the same Alice in Wonderland imagery, and it would create a link between the performance and narrative scenes. We then filled the floor of the set with light pink, dark pink, blue, white and marbled balloons, and two 24" balloons, so we were ready to start as quickly as possible when the actors arrived.

Me, Mari and Molly setting up the camera

For this scene we had our three main actors and seven extras. Despite them all being very cooperative, at the start we found it hard to organise and direct this many people. As the shoot went on, they got more used to what they had to do, more into their roles, and looked better on camera. We filmed the whole song in a wide shot several times. We switched roles around every take, with one or two people directing the actors and the others at either side of the stage throwing the balloons back into shot to keep giving the actors something to interact with and to keep the shot looking lively.

After shooting the static wide shots, we used the dolly tripod to move around the actors and get close-ups as they danced, mainly aiming to capture Georgie interacting with the extras and the DJs.

Here is a montage of some of our footage from the shoot:

We were happy with how our footage turned out, however when it came to editing it in to the sequence we realised that we didn't get the range of close-ups that we wanted, so we have scheduled pickups of this for our last shooting session.