Discussing Lighting With Geogre

Today we held a meeting with George, a lighting technician who is in charge of assessing the feasibility of the lighting for the music videos. This was essentially about us re-pitching our idea to George, who is new to the project, and him looking at any possible problems and asking certain questions from a lighting perspective. After discussing the concept and chronology of the video, both George and Luke concluded that it wasn't overly demanding in terms of lights. They established that there is four key 'set-ups', that will all need lighting (Infinity background, recording studio, green screen, fully styled, music video set.) We stressed to George our desire to have no shadows for the infinity background, which he said is easily done with sufficient lighting. They questioned whether they have an infinity background large enough to fit the whole band on in a wide shot, but said he will look into sourcing a bigger one and if not they can achieve a similar effect with white material. He also raised the issue of the band wearing white t-shirts on a white back but continued to say that this could probably be resolved through lighting the band members separately to the background. For the recording studio, he mentioned how we would have to plan for a time in the day in which we can light this, as it may take up to an hour due to the dull nature of the room. We will take this into consideration when doing our shoot schedule. When discussing this cutaway, Luke mentioned how we didn't need the shots of the band walking own the street, and should just find more content of them in the studio. To ensure this, he suggested we should shoot the whole song in the studio on the day as a 'back-up', giving us something we can cut to if completely necessary. In reference to the final set up, he seemed confident about making this happen and understood all of the lighting possibilities we had in mind such as the neon pyramid and collective beams from behind (which can be utilized especially to signify the change in setting and tone.) Once again, this was a very positive meeting that furthered the image of our video in our heads, which is progressively taking shape as we go on.

Here is a picture of some of the notes George made during the meeting;

Standard infinity background;

This a still from a Pop promo made at Hurtwood last year displaying the smaller infinity background that the school currently owns;

As we can see, this is too small to fit the entire band in one shot with out seeing the exterior background of the room. However, if the worst came to worst and the fore-mentioned 'material' was not feasible then we could shoot the wides like this and show how the band are obviously in a film studio. This would actually conform with our original concept.

These are pictures of the exact 'collective beam' lights that one of the groups from the previous year used that we are very interested in featuring in the later stages of our video;