Kickstarting the Millennium

In May 2022, Teo Simon, Sam Grant, Viktorija Brazinskaite and I created a music video to go with the song ‘Millenium’ by Celeste Madden. One of the main reasons we did this was to create a project that we could use in our Second Year Portfolio.

We began by contacting Celeste, as she was a mutual friend of the group, in the last week of March and we found that her style of music fit with the genre of video that we wanted to create. She was more than happy to not only have us make this video for her, but also to star in it. Once we had all found dates and times that we were all available to shoot, we started to brainstorm ideas for shots and locations. When we had decided on where we wanted to shoot, we went out as a group to do a location recce and ask some shop owners if it was okay for us to film in their shop in the next few days. Once that was all sorted, we collectively made a shot list and were ready to begin filming.

On the day of the shoot, the 2nd May, we had two cameras, one that we used as the main camera that was on a tripod the majority of the time, as well as and old handheld camera. This was so that we could get a mixture of high resolution shots as well as some lower quality B-roll shots, that we would later be putting affects over the top of, such as film grain and a Super8 camera mask. My main role was using this handheld camera, as well as ensuring we had the correct lighting for some of the shots.

We had quite a tight schedule on the day, so to ensure that we got every shot that we needed, and to the best quality we could, we made sure to stick to our shot list. This was further supported by the whole crew performing to the best of our ability, so that the day was completed quickly and efficiently, whilst allowing ourselves to have creative freedom with the genre we were trying to convey.

The main issue we had whilst filming was when we were in the studio. We found it difficult to make sure that the subject (Celeste) was evenly lit by the lighting rig, whilst also not having any light spill from the green screen that was behind and below her. Due to the schedule, we decided to do the best we could on the day and try to correct the majority of it in post-production. In hindsight, I feel like there are different techniques that we could have implemented that would have succeeded in correcting this, however I believe our collective knowledge on studio production, that was hindered by the COVID outbreak the year before, meant that we were limited by our experience. Nevertheless, we managed to do a good job on the post-production side that lead to us creating a scene that we were happy with and felt that it connected to the rest of the video.

Another issue that we ran into was the weather. We were hoping that is was going to be sunny on the day of the shoot, as it was the start of May and it had been the rest of the week. However this was not the case and we had to improvise by using LED lights and a light reflector to try and get the lighting conditions we were hoping for. Similar to the green spill issue mentioned before, we had to try and correct this mostly in post-production. After hours of attempting colour grading, the shots were not quite what we were envisioning, so instead of leaving it unhappy, we decided to try and make all of the shots look similar, colour-wise, which ended with the whole video feeling much more connected and it also aided with continuity.

Overall, the project was a success, with both Celeste and the team being completely satisfied with the final product. If we were to do it again today, I believe that now, with our more developed understanding of both production and post-production, we could create a project that was closer to the original vision we all had I mind, with a focus on mostly lighting, as well as transitions and camera angles.