Final set design decisions

Today we had a meeting to decide what our set is going to look like and what EXACTLY we are going to shoot.

Heres a picture of us having a chat with the set builder.

We decided that we are going to shoot the underwater shots infront of the green screen. We will use lots of fans to create the illusion of her hair and dress floating up with the movement of the water. The idea of shooting it underwater in a pool has some problems - firstly it demands a lot of the actors as they have to be in a pool in November for a long time, secondly the cameras underwater might not show the image very clearly, the camera may be hard to shoot with and thirdly it would be obvious that the shots are shot in a pool which is something we wanted to steer away from. The use of fans, maybe conditioning the hair so that it goes all over the place, the floaty dress - we feel we can get some really beautiful shots. This really puts the emphasis on how important the dress is. We have to make sure firstly the colour goes with the theme throughout the video with the colours black white and a bit of blue. This would therefore be a white dress underwater but we must make sure that the material is really light weight.

Also we would get the girls/girl to move round gracefully at normal speed but then we would change it to slow motion (6 second bursts). Although this would be great for the underwater idea with the hair going up slower and you really being able to see the movement in the costume there is also something quite fascinating and beautiful about slow motion.

We also decided that we don't want to just have one girl underwater but we will maybe have two girls underwater - the reason for this is because the shots can be more interesting as we can close up on one girl whilst the other one is further away etc.. This is something we need to decide on, and cast it as soon as possible. It also shows that this world isn't owned by the girl but she is just part of it, and this should intise the girl above water even more if she sees two underwater in this magical world. Either this or we can just make sure that the singer goes into the water earlier in the song (3 quarters of the way through) so that this gives us more to play with with the shots. We also briefly talked about having three people underwater - one boy and two girls because we thought that this could create beautiful imagery but the problem that we have is people might read into the relationships underwater, also the costume for it - we would need to make sure that the boy really fits in with all of the video. So this is something we must decide on ASAP but I think we are all steering towards the idea of just having two girls.

We are going to shoot on location at the pond above (picture). The reason for this is because creating a set in the studio to make it look like a pond isn't half as good as actually shooting at a pond after we had done some research into it and started to try and plan it. We can get some shots of her reflection on the water by using a real pond - or we may be able to edit this in. We will shoot this in the evening so that it is dark because this is good for the whole magical feel. And as you can see from the photograph the reflections on the water at night does really work. Another aspect to the pond part that we are thinking of having is light graffiti - this would obviously work at this time of the day as it is dark so it will be able to be seen. We are going on a recki next week to check out the location.

Also for the shot of the girl getting pulled in (willingly) we want to shoot this in a pool. However we might need to line the pool black so that it goes with the style of the underwater dance that we created using a green screen. There are obvious problems with putting a black lining down but it won't go with the whole video if we have the girl going into the blue pool. If we cannot get the black down into the pool we will have to think of another way that we can create this or another way to act it out. But if it can be achieved it should all link very nicely to create one whole video.

There is a lot of practical photography that we will add on top of eachother. This will help 3 dimensional it and the layers will make it look even more magical -this will be bubbles, particals in water which we will shoot on the day and stick on the top of the shots that we get. This will create a really surreal world but really paint the image of it being underwater.

We have definitely decided to loose the bed part of the video because we don't need it. Also it is a bit cliche and because of the sound of the song being surreal the video can be surreal without having to be explained.