Rehearsals

Yesterday, our group had a rehearsal with our cast and went through each set discussing choreography and what they would be wearing.  We then filmed this to see what it looked like. 

Before the rehearsal, I emailed the cast once again to make sure they knew when they were needed:

We booked a camera for 3pm and Mina marked out the size of our sets with gaffer tape on the floor so were able to see how well the furniture and people that we wanted fitted in and if this needed to be changed.  We also had to make sure they weren't too big otherwise we wouldn't be able to fit everything in the studio and wouldn't be able to get a lens wide enough to get all three sets in the same shot.  Here is a sketch of the three sets that Mina marked out:

The things that we aimed to work out in that afternoon were:

1. Exactly what will happen during each part of the song
2. Who will be where in each shot and what will they be doing - this might need to be changed as we thought we might find the sets may be a bit cluttered/crowded, which would lead us to rethink what furniture or how many extras we would include

When I first came into the studio and studied the three sets that Mina had marked out, I realised how small the cafe/restaurant would be and therefore decided that we would only need one table and two chairs of the bistro set and have a man sitting at the bar reading a newspaper/drinking coffee.  Mina had also marked out the bar on the right hand corner, which gave even less space so I moved this to the left corner and we had more room.  She also hadn't considered the doors that we would have in each set so I marked these out, which gave us even less space.

We began our rehearsal with a production meeting with all our cast about what we would be doing.   Maxim and Theo also turned up to our rehearsal, which confused us as we were told the day before they weren't in it - this is significant that we organise who is definetly in our cast or not by the end of the week.   

As the majority of our cast that were present were in the cafe/restaurant scenes we began with the cafe.  A mistake that we made was that our team didn't clearly define our roles before the rehearsals and therefore, at the beginning our cast were recieving instructions from all of our group, which was confusing.  To make sure this doesn't happen on the day of our shoot, our group can swap roles and take sections of the video each for each role - this is something we would need to discuss in our next production meeting.

Eventually, our group organised ourselves and I directed most of the rehearsal as I had organised our choreography while Mina Sarah and Chuffy swapped roles in camera and sound and also helped direct at some points. 

The first thing we realised on the cafe set was that the boys dancing behind Emma didn't work as it was too awkward.  We then tried and filmed different ways in which we could do this scene with all our group coming up with various suggestions.  We finally decided that Emma would first go up to a man on the table (Toby) steal his hat and then walk away from him towards Maxim at the bar who she would dance infront of and then go towards the door, blow a kiss and then run into her dressing room. 


After we finished the cafe scene, we moved onto the bar scene.  We began this in the last photoshoot (the beach) where Jack Flamminger would be the photographer and then went through all our choreography right up till the end trying to use as much similar camera angles and shots as we could.  

Unfortunately, when Mina went up to the editing suite to edit all these clips, she discovered that many had been deleted and therefore she was only able to use the shots that we had left (note that some of these weren't our best but gave us an idea of what it would look like on camera).  Here is a short sequence of our rehearsal:


Overall I think our cast worked really well and we learnt a lot from this.  Thus, we have decided that the bar scene works and that our new cafe scene works a lot better.

After we finished our rehearsals and cleared the studio, our group had a production meeting and discussed what we had learnt from the rehearsal and what we still needed to do:

1. We learnt that preparation and planning will lead to a better shoot and a better product:  time spent rehearsing in our rehearsals will be time we don't waste on our shoot day, which will give us better footage and more time
2. We learnt that we will work better as a team if we have clearlt defined roles.
3. We decided that we should have one more rehearsal, possibly the Tuesday after halfterm.  This would be essential for Emma as we would need to film her lip syncing the song as she was shy about doing this in yesterdays rehearsal.  It is not essential that we call all of the boys back but maybe that we go through our dressing room scenes as we didn't concentrate this in our last rehearsal.
4. We discussed that maybe in our next rehearsal with Emma that we ask her to try and be a bit more sexy rather than theatrical as this began to look quite cheesy infront of the camera.  The boys were also doing this but once we made them aware, they stopped so we don't need to worry about this (just to remind them before we shoot)
5. We need to email or the cast once again and get them to take a picture of their costumes and send it to us so we can confirm that's all organised. 
6. We need to organise exactly who is in our music video as there is confusion whether Theo Bhat and Maxim Baldry are in it.  If Theo isn't in it, we have someone that can play an instrument instead but we aren't sure about Maxim yet.
7. We need to send the band the music (keyboard and bass player) so they know how to play the song