Yesterday  I shot my moving image piece for the first project. my references are advertising videos from brands such as pretty little thing, boohoo and misguided. My aim before i started was for the shoot to be as fun as possible, so that my model looks like she's genuinely enjoying herself, and so that she didn't feel awkward dancing about on her own. This was important as I wanted my footage to feel authentic. I wanted to shoot my moving image in the studio so that it remains consistent with my other images as all my portraits were shot in the studio. I chose to use the daylight studio because it would already give me some ambient light to play with combined with the light from the HMI lights I used. I had never used the HMI lights before and this was a good opportunity as I needed the constant daylight balanced lights compared to the flash. My set up was as below: I had two HMI lights, one reflecting off the ceiling to produce a soft overall light, and one with a giant softbox lighting the model. I gave myself a lot of room between the lights, the model, and me because I knew we were going to have alot of movement so I considered this with my set up, making sure the lighting was consistent across the backdrop too.

A problem I encountered during filming was having shaky hands, I tried using the studio stand but I struggled with the lack of movement and it was frustrating trying to shoot an angle that I couldn't get.  I shot as much footage as possible with the idea that its better to have too much footage than too little.  After editing it all together today, I am very grateful that I had so much footage to work with.

when I came to editing the footage today I was hit immediately by the fact I had shot the large majority of my footage portrait rather than landscape. When it came to putting the clips together, I had some which were landscape but the majorty of my footage was portrait. I hadn't even thought about the rotation of films, any screen I'd ever seen a clip on other than a mobile phone. I felt so stupid, but was happy with the footage I'd shot and didn't want it to hinder how it looked in post. I knew I wanted to play about with effects such as split screen and running footage backwards etc, and split screen was a good way of filling the screen with three images all doing the same. I really liked the effect but didn't want it throughout. After speaking to mike and discovering I couldn't change the orientation of the screen, I took his advice and presented my footage in the same format that the BBC News do when they show a video from a mobile phone on the screen and have the same video but slightly cropped in and with a Gaussian blur over it. I think this works really well as a technique as you can still see the full shot within the frame. In some of my shots I zoomed in to fill the frame with a single clip, where it didn't matter if you couldn't see the whole thing. By using different techniques like this I think I created a successful and interesting moving image clip.

For sound, I worked by myself in garage band creating a simple upbeat sound clip wanting to reflect the fun style of my footage. I again took inspiration from Missguided and Pretty little thing, keeping it simple but full of energy. This was successful and for my first attempt at shooting moving image, this went really well.

The only criticism I have of my moving image piece is that it isn't as consistent within my images as I'd hoped it would have been. The model is consistent and the overall mood and lighting is the same, I kept it flat and simple, however one of the main aspects of my stills is colour and I haven't managed to really bring that out from within my moving image. When I took this to my workshop and worked towards feedback I worked on adjusting the curves of individual images so that the lighting was much more similar. (see below) This improved the similarity however I'm still not 100% pleased with my final outcome. If I had more time I would try this again, maybe shooting outside where I could try and replicate the surroundings more and get some more consistency between still and moving.


Below is my final moving image piece.

After finishing my moving image I experimented with potential professional contexts which my video could be placed in. An obvious one was for a misguided advert so I looked at how they include their branding within moving image and added a logo at the end of my film. It works really well and is very conceivable had a viewer not known that it wasn't real. Adding this context to my work helped me to understand and see myself in a commercial market and gave me some confidence that my work could eventually sit quite comfortably in that sort of environment.