Second shoot in as many days for our ‘Mollusc’ music video and I’m very happy with the progress we’ve made. Our first studio session involved several shots of the band with projections over their faces while they sang along to the song. This kind of footage is important for our video as it gives us something to cut between our more dynamic footage.

While filming we were given proof of a lesson I learned from the Lizzie McGuire movie years and years ago, actually singing along looks way better than lip syncing. Despite the fact that it was their song, when the band members just tried lip syncing it looked out of sync and unnatural.

We were lucky enough during this shoot that a tech guy was on hand to help us set up our lighting for our last shot, which involved 10 extras dressed as witches dancing in frame. We wanted the lighting to be from mostly one side and illuminate the people at the front well, but leave those at the back shrouded in darkness to create the illusion that there were more people than there were.

After seeing the lighting set up we were helped to create, I’m starting to understand where we’ve been going wrong with a lot of our shoots. The shot itself is quite dark:

But in reality the room was very well lit:

Learning the difference between how things are lit in real life versus how they appear on camera is a long and difficult lesson that I am nowhere near close to understanding, but this shoot has given me valuable knowledge about how to go about setting up lighting.