Setting up appropriate equipment P3 (a)

Below you can see the booking sheet that we used to book the equipment we wanted. It is important to use such kind of booking sheet because school sometimes doesn't have enough units of equipment to provide it for all the students at the same time. So we had to ask for a date when we could have equipment that we needed. We had to plan and think about what equipment we will need to use for each scene and for how long we were going to use it. This was important because all the students from our group wanted to film on weekends and there wasn't enough equipment and sometimes we could film for only a couple of hours and then pass the camera and other things to the next student. That made the process of filming a little bit hard.

In our filming we tried to use as many equipment as possible to experience it all and surely benefit from using it as some additional parts of equipment usually can improve efficiency of filming. 

The first part of equipment I want to talk about was PS-Hague Pro Steadymount.

So the reason for using this piece of equipment was that it helps to make the filming stable and to avoid such mistakes as shaking camera or too fast movement of the camera when filming. It was extremely helpful equipment when we were filming exterior footage as it provided a stable picture and the camera man didn't have to hold the camera still in his hand which is really tiring. However when we were filming inside the buildings especially at those places where there weren't enough space to for example turn around and at those places where the camera man needed space to move quickly this equipment was not as useful and we usually just holded camera in our hands. 

Here are two photos of me holding this piece of equipment. 

Another peace of equipment we have used was obviously the camera Canon 7D DSLR. All the footage was taken with this camera. Good battery allowed us to film without charging the camera for almost whole day and changeable lenses allowed to make different kind of shots from long shots to extreme close ups. Also the camera is really easy to hold and it doesn't weigh a lot, so this was really useful as we always had to move when filming such scenes as the second one where Pasha is walking towards the camera. Also we could change such settings as ISO and aperture to get a level of light in the shot that we needed. The camera is able to capture video in high definition and this is really important because we wanted our music video to be of the best quality possible. Here are the pictures of the camera. 

The next piece that we have used were lenses for the camera. We always booked as many as we could so that we were able to change them and use different lenses for different shots.

Lenses that we used:

Canon 50mm f/ 1.8 mf/af (Human Eye Effect)

Canon 18-55mm zoom f/3.5-5.6 USM mf/af (Wide Angle)

Canon 55-250mm zoom f/4-5.6 USM mf/af (Zoom)

The 50mm lens creates a human eye effect so it is very similar to the picture interpreted by the human eye. This creates the so called effect of the human eye. The 18-55mm lens gives you a range of distances to view. You get a very wide picture which captures the whole environment which is useful when showing the scenery. Finally the 55-250mm lens is very good for zooming in from far distances of shooting an extreme close up because you can quickly and smoothly zoom in or out.

So for shots from the short distance we used 50m lense to make an effect of human eye and as we didn't need to zoom in or out a lot because this lense is not suitable for zooming. Also this particular lense allowed us to change the focus while filming that gave us an opportunity to be able to play with the focus in our music video. 

The next part of our equipment was Tripod - Velbon DV6000. 

The tripod is a very important part of our equipment as it allowed us to hold the camera still in some shots and turn it smoothly without any shaking around itself using a special handle. But we hardly ever used it in our filming as mostly we had to film on the move and didn't have time to set a tripod and put a camera on it. Also even if we did, we always had problems with putting the camera at the top of it. As the tripod was used by a lot of student before it could been broken and if it was the camera would fall and break down. Below is a picture of a tripod and a Canon 7D set on it. 

Also tripod can be adjusted to different heights. 

The other thing we used was Microphone - Rode VideoMic-R Shotgun. This microphone is able to capture sound of the best quality. We needed sound so that after the filming is done we could do the lips sink by listening what Pasha was singing and the words in the original song. Here are some photos of this microphone combined with the camera Canon 7D. 

The last piece of equipment that we used was a Canon camera bag. This bag helped us to carry the camera and the lenses as it has enough space for both. It is made of rubber so if the rain started the camera and other equipment would be dry and clean.