Filming the Montage

The easter break was filled with festivity, drinking and chocolate and by the final week I needed to get my head down and do some work. I had previously brainstormed ideas for a montage which included concepts such as transportation, travelling, food preparation, dancing and musical instruments. None of these involved a specific narrative but instead would be an experimental collection of shots.

I decided to go with the musical instrument concept and got my main inspiration from music videos that use montage to show different live clips, sometimes showing energetic performances played to slow songs, I was particularly interested in the Strokes music video for Reptilia in which the majority of the shots are close-ups of the bands instruments and shown in a split screen format, I was keen to emulate this video using lots of experimental shots of the instruments, but I ended up simply capturing the bands playing instead. I was mainly looking forward to this exercise as a way of experimenting with shots and becoming more confident using a camera. I managed to do two different shoots for my montage, one which involved me filming my friend practicing on drums and playing guitar on his roof.


Since filming the footage I have only reviewed it once but I am happy with some of the composition for the shots of him playing guitar and on some overhead shots of him playing drums where I stood on his window ledge and pointed the camera downwards. I also consciously did crane, panning and tracking shots at this point.


The second film shoot was of a friends band practice where i collected an hours worth of footage. Problems arose with lighting, as I had left the white balance on the outdoor preset from filming on the roof so the majority of the shot looks quite dark and slightly brown. After changing the white balance to indoor the colour looked a lot better. I had a lot of trouble getting any two of the band members in shot at the same time as the room was too small, even standing in the very corner didn't help much. I've definitely learnt that recceing a location with a camera before shoot is the best thing to do, and the more open the space the better the shots will be.

I had planned to film the Apostates at band practice however they had to cancel at the last minute, luckily I already had footage of a gig they played a few weeks earlier so I decided to use that. The venue is far too dark so I had to use nightvision which gives everything a green tint, during this shoot I moved around a lot to get different shots and found that there were some decent shots of the band and they are very energetic performers which made it interesting to watch and provided a contrast to the previous bands laid back band practice.

Here's the video for the Strokes' Reptilia: