Emma Upton

Music Video Production Diary

As my role as producer in our music video, it was part of my job to find appropriate locations to shoot on. So after carefully looking at the final script I came up with the idea of shooting outside shots in Manchester, the shots inside in my house and other outdoor shots in my back garden. After conferring with the group we all agreed this was the plan, as town would be a perfect place with natural lighting and busy crowds to make the scenes look more natural and not set up, my house because everyone could easily get to it and my back garden because we could get both the house shots and garden shots done in the same day to save time.

Town: My house:

My back garden:

Another aspect of my role was to make sure all the cast turned up on time and keep everyone to stick to the schedule, which I think our group did very well. I made sure to keep contact with each members of the group via text or group chat and made sure they were all reminded the morning of each shoot when and where to meet in each location. We got all the filming done within around 2/3 days so I think time keeping was definitely a strong point.

The only real difficulty we found when filming was the strong unnatural lighting in the shots filmed in my house. So as producer I had to find a solution to this, so I decided because there wasn’t much we could change about the lighting as if we didn’t use the lights the shots would have been far too dark, so I decided to keep the lights on and then colour correct the shots in post-production.

Emma Upton

When filming I also took on the role of being an actor, playing the girlfriend of the music video. This added pressure to make sure I knew the script thoroughly was difficult; however I believe I managed both roles equally well. On days of filming I had to do both roles equally at the same day throughout the days, so while making sure we stuck to schedule and script, I had to be on camera each day of filming. I slightly struggled with this role more than my role as producer, because I’m usually very camera shy and I’ve never been in front of the camera this much before, however I definitely think I overcame this and from filming become far more confident in front of the camera.

Technical quality played a big part of our music video; we shot in 1080p and 25fps. I think the quality of our video turned out brilliant, the shots we used are all in focus and with equal exposure. The subject of the shot is always in frame, so I think all these aspects combined made a music video with high video quality.