Yesterday me and my colleague filmed the gig at the Castle Hotel for the band Blackout City. We arrived at 2pm as we had planned and got to work on a location recce.
Location Recce:
The first thing we had to decide when we got there was where we were going to put the main camera that would stay on a tripod getting the constant wide shot. I the room wasn't fully ready for the evening at this time and people were in and out moving things around meaning it was hard to know what the room was going to look like in the end. Their were a number of tables crammed into a small space and I overheard one of the members of the hotel staff saying there was going to be about 40 or so guest at the party. There was also a table on the dance floor itself but we were informed this would be being moved before the bands set. I wanted to take extra care not to be in anyone's way so I set up the tripod and looked at a few potential different locations. I started at the back of the room but quickly realised there was a mini bar being set up right behind us, as well as then being in the way of people at the bar the people dancing would have been in the way of getting a clear wide shot of the band. My colleague suggested moving close and going more towards the side of the dance floor and at first I was sceptical as I thought this might be in the way of people moving on and off the dance floor. I had a look at what a shot would look like from the left side of the dance floor (see below) but we were then told that is where the DJ was going to be so we were unable to film from their either. I then switched sides to the other side of the dance floor and luckily this is where we would find a good balance between getting a nice shot and having the space to set up and not be in anyone's way. Once we had our camera placement we searched around and luckily their was a socket near by as my colleagues camera that I wanted to use for the wide shot needed to be plugged in all the time as she could only rent out one battery for it. During the recce I also tested the sound quality of the directional microphones we had bought to put on our cameras and the quality was pretty good. I only wanted to have these as back up really in case there was any issues with the bassists recording device which during the recce he did not have on him as it was charging which meant I had to test it later on. I did however make sure there was a small space in front of the camera where the small tripod that holds the recording device could go. Once I was happy with the placement of everything and I was happy that my equipment was in a safe place out of everyone's way I moved on to doing some test shots. It was hard to test the wide angle shot as we did not know how many people would be on the dance floor so we had to test just by having one of us step onto the dance floor and see how in the way of the shot they were in different parts of the dance floor. We came to the conclusion that the dance floor would at some point get quite busy and therefore people would be in the way of the wide shot so I said to my colleague who was going to be capturing the wide shot in the evening to just do some smooth pans across the crowd if the shot of the band got blocked at all so that we had some good crowd shots as well. I was going to be getting the close ups with my camera on the night and I had planned to get some close ups in the afternoon just so I had some extra shots when it came to the edit. I did however realise that the band would be wearing different clothes in the evening meaning I couldn't use the shots I got in the afternoon in the edit although the two songs I recorded in the afternoon did give me some good test shots.
In conclusion the recce had its challenges but that is really what location recces are for, they're there as a practice so you can deal with any issues before had. Dealing with these issues earlier on in the day ultimately helped things run a lot smoother when we went back to shoot the gig for real in the evening.
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