Filming Blog

On Thursday I finally filmed my first project. Although I was really excited it turned out to be even more stressful than I’d ever imagine. Me and my group gathered all our equipment and started our journey to the field. We had decided on shooting a track and field themed Nike commercial. So anyways, we were on our way to the field, I carried the storyboard for our commercial and my notebook so we could have all the angles and shots. In order to get the running block we had to walk all the way to 21, 3rd floor and retrieve the key or the track room on the field. Thank goodness it wasn’t much of a issue because Jahleel is familiar with the coach. Anyways, after we retrieved the key we continued our journey to the track, I must admit we were a little scared because we didn’t know how we were going to film with all those other people running around the track. Regardless of our hesitation, we were still persistent in getting it done. So we decided to just follow our with our plan.

At the track it took us a couple minutes to find the perfect place to set up. When we finally found a place, we begun to set up the camera, which I must admit it was harder than it looked. We eventually got the camera set up right and I thought we should start with our warm up scene because we accidentally left the headphones for the first scene in class. I ended up shooting the warm up shot at first, it was a wide angle, but I also allowed other members of my group to do it in case they could get a better shot. Because the sum kept moving, we had to redo a lot of the scenes. It became frustrating, because at first we had shot some related scenes in contradicting locations, so that’s another reason why we had to do a lot of things over. After we shot the warm up scene we got started with the introductory scene. This scene was only done twice because it wasn’t as difficult, all we were doing was a over the head shot with a little movement. I also shot that scene but I asked another member to shoot it again so we’d have more of a variety to choose from.  We ended up been set back when more people started to enter the track, but we made it work.

After we finally got done with those two scenes we got 2 takes of the actor changing his Nike workout attire to Nike running attire and his Nike shoes. That part was fun to do because we got up close with the shoes and the logo and it felt really realistic. By the time we were done shooting that it was around 8:40! We were running out of time but there’s no way we were going to head back to class without being finished so we just tried our hardest to spread it up. The other scene was just another simple scene, the actor just had to get into the running block and run. There ended up being a huge class in the camera frame so we had to pack up and more to the other side of the track. Filming the running scene wasn’t as bad, I didn’t shot this one, I had the task of saying the casual “ready, set, go.” We had to do that scene three times because we couldn’t figure out how to zoom the camera, we eventually figure it out but it sure took sometime. Lastly, we shot our close up for the last take, that was the easiest one of all, that was one of the most important takes because most Nike commercials have that type of ending and it made the film more dramatic. When we were done we just packed up everything, put the block back, and walked to class, of course one of our group members went to go return the key, but that was pretty much it. Oh, and we ended up bring the last group to finish filming so one of us had to stay back to dump everything.