So I’ve made a post before talking about the difficulties I encountered while filming outdoors at night, which were pretty much that it was much darker than expected, bugs everywhere and the time limit of working at night.

So, take two. First up, I don’t know why I keep going to locations near water, because what that means is there’re mosquitoes EVERYWHERE. At least this time I was wearing jeans so my legs were spared. Poor Jenny wasn’t so lucky. But I think this means I’ve finally learnt my lesson: BRING BUG REPELLENT.

I did learn one lesson from last time, which was bring more than one light panel! We had two light panels as well as a half dozen torches, and we began filming when it was still light out, which actually turned out looking very dark on the camera. Our lighting situation was planned out much better this time, as I made a list of shots, and those that required a view of the landscape we filmed while it was light, whereas the closer up shots that we could film without having to light up a larger area we did when it got dark. Even with this preparation we were racing the sun to get it all done and by our last scenery shot we had to add some of the light panels to make sure we could see our singers face.

On the night we continued filming well into dark as we had a shot list to get through, but looking over the footage I’m starting to think we would have been better filming at twilight across several days. This would definitely be the case in a film or shoot that required consistency of lighting, but I think we’ll get away with it because we are making a music video, where lighting changes can be put down to metaphorical or aesthetic choices.

Also I climbed a tree