Fourth Day Filming

On Saturday the 20th of January we completed our 4th day of filming in Shipley and Ilkley. Early in the morning we caught a train to Shipley where we were going to be filming. We only needed a few shots from Shipley as Ed found a really good location for the end of the first part of the narrative. The scene takes place seconds after James has been kicked off the train for not having a ticket. He then walks onto the bridge which goes above the train. It's on this bridge that he collapses and seems to give up on his life, therefore concluding the first narrative of our video.

Once we arrived at the location we firstly began by setting the camera up at one side of the bridge. When we started filming James would walk into shot, walk along the bridge and then drop his bag on the bridge and then collapses next to it. It is a simple shot however we tried a few different places for James to collapse in. This just gives us options for whether we want a long shot or a mid-shot and we wanted to have plenty of footage to work with because the symmetry of the bridge was lovely and we wanted to make the most of it. After completing this shot we changed to camera position so we could do an extreme close up on James. We decided on this as we wanted to show the emotion his character was feeling after the realisation that he had lost everything. We want this to be a very powerful moment in our video. Again, this close up was very simple but we took a few takes just so we had a variety of emotions portrayed by James. The final shot we tried to film in Shipley was James walking up the stairs towards the bridge. We decided to do this last minute because we were worried we didn't have enough footage to fill the allocated time we gave ourselves due to the pace of the music. So we added an extra shot just to be safe. This was a tricky shot as the train line itself couldn't be in shot as we were using a different location to the one he got kicked off at. So we didn't want to risk a continuity error. Taking this into consideration took time as we had to find a good camera angle which focused on James but without showing the railway. Once we found this we also had a focusing issue as the handrail was right in the foreground of the shot. This meant we would have to adjust the focus as James walked up the stairs and doing this while he is always moving was challenging. After a few test shots we finally got a shot in which James was in focus. However, we decided to make it so he was out of focus at the start of the shot and as he walked we performed a focus pull which put him into focus once he reached the top of the stairs.

Originally the plan for this scene was to have a time lapse shot of people walking past James as they got off their trains and tried to get on with their day. However, this didn't work because the station was very quiet therefore the time lapse effect wouldn't have worked at all therefore we changed our plan and just used the normal DLSR rather than moving to the GoPro camera. This is the reason we needed to add shots as we had planned the time lapse shot to last for a whole instrumental section and one long shot wouldn't look good if we left it for that entire period of time. The pace of the song requires us to use quicker cuts in order to fit to the tone of the song.

Once we got the train back to Ilkley we had to re-film James sleeping on the bench. We tried to film this the night before however the location we chose wasn't as well lit as we hoped therefore the camera quality wasn't what we wanted. Therefore we just shot a single take in which James sat on the bench, got his sleeping bag out and then tries to go to sleep. It was very simple as we had done it before so everything was done very quickly as we could move onto the next shot.

After this shot we stayed in Ilkley to film both versions of the coffee scene. To begin with we filmed the happy version which shows James drinking a coffee on a bench. This was an easy shot as it was static and therefore only needed one take. After this Melissa's mum came into Ilkley to film the next scene as we required an added extra. In this version we see two extras happy and drinking coffee on the same bench James was on whilst James walks in the background looking sad. He then continues to walk off until he is out of shot. This shot will hopefully clearly show the audience that our narrative is the same story twice as the shots will look identical as we didn't move the camera at all in between recording the two sections.

The final thing we had to film on this day was the final montage that shows James rebuilding his life. This montage included: him shaving, him looking in the mirror, making his bed, a money jar filling up and him talking with his friend. All of these scenes were easy to film as they are all very short clips. However, we needed to film it in the correct order because once James shaved off his beard he wouldn't have the homeless look anymore so we can't film anything from the previous parts of the video. Therefore we had to make sure everything else was filmed before this moment. After this all we have to film is the final scene which shows James walking back through Leeds however he is now wearing a suit and looking much more successful. This final shot will show the full contrast between how James is at the start of the video and his final transformation at the end.