Tripod Terrors (Production Blog)

 Dearest reader, 

Yesterday night I filmed all the solo scenes for my music video. A good majority of the music video was me alone since the story is more about a girl getting over a break up, rather than the relationship itself. That being said, I only needed my friends for two scenes and a picture. 

First, I needed to pull out the frame from the footage Marvin and I got that would serve as a picture. I went ahead and picked my frame and then threw it on a word doc so I could edit the size and print it to my needs. I cut a piece of poster board to paste underneath. This makes it so that when I pick it up it won't appear flimsy like a piece of paper I just printed at home (I did). My printer is not capable of printing in color. Due to this hiccup I went with an old timey theme for the letters I use in later scenes to stay consistent. 

The title of this blog originated from the misadventures of filming my over the shoulder scenes. I struggled the most with these due to the sheer proximity and angling I needed to achieve. This scene would have been easier to film if I was standing. However, since I was sitting on my bed, the tripod left some things to be desired. First of all, my tripod really only has three heights. I call these tiny Barbie height, dog height and chest height. My bed is pretty high compared to a usual twin and it created this predicament where the camera was only a little over a half foot above the mattress standing on its own. If I tried to film using this angle I was taking up like 90% of the camera no matter what I did and the picture and yearbook weren't clearly visible. I had to do something really scary to combat this. I had to put my tripod on dog height and balance it precariously on my vanity stool to get the desired height. Overall, besides the over the shoulder scene, the rest of the frames were very easy to shoot alone and I shouldn't run into any more difficulties till later in editing.