Brightclub.com.ph

So we shot a music video last weekend. And even though things didn't turn out exactly the way I saw it in my head, what we were able to capture is probably just as good if not better than my original plan. Also, turns out that music videos are pretty expensive to make, so I'd like to take this time to cover the whole process and show you guys what it took to produce and shoot this video.

We didn't have a fancy studio at our disposal, I was also reluctant to shoot in a remote location because of the equipment we would have to lug around. That's the reason why we decided to shoot here at BC HQ in a makeshift studio in my grandma's ballroom. We already had the music equipment, but we still needed the studio and video equipment for the shoot. Here is a rundown of most of the gear we used during the shoot.

I bought a Canon 550d last January for this video specifically. The quality of the video is not as good as the Canon 5d but considering our budget, this was the perfect choice. A week before the shoot I also got an extra battery and an extra memory card which turned out to be a very very important since it took most of the day to finish the whole thing. Camera costs me around 60k with a 135mm lens, extra battery costs around 3k and the 16 gig memory card was 4k, bought everything at Fotohub located at Il Terazzo, Tomas Morato.

Set-wise I settled for a white background for the video. I did alot of research to see what material I was gonna use. Alot of people suggested seamless background paper or velvet, but I settled for white canvas material from Fotohub as well. It has a width of 10 feet 2 inches and each yard costs 380 pesos. Also got some background clips from the same place, each box has 10 clips inside and costs 500 pesos. For the enclosure, I bought 2 ready-made tents from Ace hardware, each one costs 950 pesos and is around 8 feet high. I had to Frankenstein some parts from the other one to get the height we needed.

I also bought a couple of tarps as well as some other arts and crafts stuff for the logo, but unfortunately, the wind was our enemy and we had to abandon that Idea.

Setting up was kind of difficult. I already finished a couple nights earlier, but we discovered that our initial positioning was gonna be a problem since the wind kept blowing our background away. This meant that I had to move everything over to a new location where the wind didn't affect it as much, basically starting over. Anyway, I was able to finish in time, and I was pretty happy with the outcome, considering that we were just running this shoot in my backyard (kinda.)

This was a good learning experience. The wind taught us a great lesson for picking a location for your shoot, we also had problems with FOOTPRINTS IN A WHITE FLOOR, also how shadows ruining everything, and assessing the length of your shooting area only became apparent when everything was already setup. It would have been nice to have a wider area to shoot from, since It felt kinda tight for most of it, especially the band shots. But we did get alot of great footage, and I'm sure I'll be able to whip something up that looks awesome.

Stay tuned next time, I'm gonna talk about people involved in the shoot. Mainly, shooting video with a photographer, shopping with the Reluctant Stylista, and the band's first make-up experience.