Equipment
Camera
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700D & zoom lens
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Back-up battery
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Charger
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2 lenses
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Ring Light
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Macro filters
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Regular filters
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SD Card
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Tripod & shoe
All of this equipment should ensure that we manage to record our video without any problems. A back-up battery is essential, and an extra SD card could come in handy. I'm taking a charger just in case we can charge up on location, but I'll make sure everything's fully charged before we go. I don't know if we will use the ring light, but it could come in useful.
Props
We didn't have many props in our production, since most of our shots depended on the location, and the focus was on the couple.
Ben's guitar was the most important prop that we used. Without it, he would have had to just sing directly to the camera. While this can work, it can often look awkward, especially if your performer hasn't done this many times before. Having a guitar gave Ben something to do with their hands, rather than not knowing what to do with them. It also made his performance seem more convincing, since it helped with his timing.
Furthermore, James Bay's guitar is almost as important as he is, and he's rarely seen without it on album art or in videos, so felt that we definitely needed one in our music video. The virbant red colour also makes it stand out, drawing the audience's attention to it.
Another prop we used in the production of our music video was a rowboat. We used it as one of the various stereotypical relationship activities seen throught our product. We chose the park that we used as our main location because it was so big and could be made to look like different places, and it had the ability to hire a boat on the lake for 30 minutes or an hour. 30 minutes gave us plenty of time to get all the footage of the couple talking and looking slightly less happy with each other, since this was in the second half of the music video, when things start to change between them.
One of our props that we didn't end up using were these coffe / hot chocolate cups. We intented to use them as another typical couple thing to do, and to show the couple looking happy together. These shots were going be used to contrast when they were at the beach later in the video. They would have been eating separate chips, rather than sharing, while walking slightly apart from each other along the beach. Since we didn't film at the beach in the end, and we had enough other footage, we no longer needed to use these shots.
Lighting
All of our filming was done outside on a sunny day, so we didn't need to use the ring light I brought along. I wanted to use it, because music videos sometimes use them, so you can see the light reflecting off their eyes. However, when we tried it, and the shots looked un-natural, and it was uncomfortable for the actors.
