Construction Post 3: Week 3 Production

In our third week of production, we completed the rest of the photoshoot for our professional promotional shots. 

Overview of the Week:

I think that week 3 of production was very successful.

We wanted to promote our band as fun loving, out-going, adventurous and London based musicians.We managed to shoot a range of promotional photographs in a few different locations. This gave us a lot of choice for photographs of our artist to put on our website, along us to successfully promote our band members in the way we wanted.

We used Emilio's camera for our shoots. We chose locations in London in which to shoot, and these locations were:

• Haselbury Road Park (Edmonton Green)

• Church Street Bus Stop (Edmonton Green)

• Whitechapel 

Our group chose to shoot on Haselbury Road as it is on the road of our school, so it would cut down on time and money to travel, which was important due to our time limitations. Tom was not available to shoot for this day, so we decided to focus on shooting photographs of Casey and Hugh and foregrounding their playful relationship as brother and sister. We did this by shooting lots of photos of them climbing trees and going on playground equipment.

We then shot in Whitechapel, this time with the whole band, and got some nighttime shots of London with the band. This portrays a different side of the band, as it shows them as a tight friendship group as well as a professional band.

With these promotional shots, we chose a variety of different angles and framing to get a good range of photos to choose from. For instance, in the Casey and Hugh shots, we shot the pair next to each other in mid shots to make them appear close as siblings. These looked more professional, but provided plenty of meaning into their relationship as siblings.

We shot some band shots as 'selfies', with Casey taking a photo of all of us on a phone; this reinforces their image as a tight friendship group, and also taps into the culture of our target audience, who publish their selfies on social media as means of advertising their activities. These shots looked less professional, but were more relatable and appealing to our audience.

Although the technical kit was not unlike the kit I've used before, I did have another good chance to work with a camera to create photos, except this time in outdoor locations. I learned a lot about using backdrops such as trees, branches, equipment, brick walls and other pieces of our surroundings to my advantage in order to create an interesting shot.

My group all had opportunities to use the camera and we all fed in new ideas for shots when we reached the location. I believe that we all came out of this week having had a good experience.

Overall, I am very happy with how the photos that Noa, Emilio and I took came out, and I am confident that they will be very useful when publishing them on our website to promote our artist.

My contribution:

During the third week of production, I:

• Shot a lot of the promo shots, including the photos of Casey and Guy.

• Performed in front of camera as Hugh Tyler. 

• Offered ideas for potential shots that involved aspects of our environment. 
• Helped organise locations.

Challenges we faced and how we overcame them:

For the shoot in Edmonton Green, we did not have Tom available to perform as Terence in front of the camera. This was a shame as we could not have any full band shots with these locations. However, we decided that we would instead focus on shooting shots of Casey and Hugh, as we had previously not had an opportunity to have many photos which show their relationship as brother and sister. After the shoot, we realised that this was a better use of our time, as we already had many whole band shots from the second week of production, and this proved to be a minor set back.

We also had to take photos in the evening for the Whitechapel shoot. This was a challenge as it is hard to create a professional quality photo with such low ambient light. We shot in the brightest areas we could find, such as in walkways which had lamps in them. We also decided to create shots that were purposefully less professional looking so that they appeared more genuine and like photos that a group of friends would take of themselves. We found that this approach demonstrated a new side of the band and in the end, we were happy with the quality and overall look of our photos from that evening.