Shooting Birdy's Shelter Video

This is a short blog post on how I spent my February half term…

My fellow media coursework member Radhika and I decided to recreate the incredible song Shelter, by Birdy. We both really like this artist, so we thought it would be good to do something we were enthusiastic about. I really wanted to get behind the camera, seen as I was constantly being filmed for the Blue Skies video. Therefore Radhika was the actor, which she really enjoyed doing. We aimed to take shot for shot, of the first minuet of the song, and as precisely as we could. Radhika was great in taking direction and she also was great help in suggesting other shots we could use. It was a long process but we managed to find a perfect location in the end. It was hard, due to the fact we were filming in a cold month, which meant there were no leaves on the trees, and in Birdy’s video her forest is full of foliage. This made it extremely hard to find the right sort of background location for us to film. However a positive is the type of overcast day it was, which fit with Birdy's weather in her video. The lighting worked very well, and in some places we had to edit the scene darker.
We managed to pull off quite a challenging long day and in my opinion I think the music and the scenes we took works well in establishing similar themes and conventions to Birdys origional video.

We took quite a few shots of heer singing the song, so that we could sync her lips in time with the music later in editing. We used Radhika's phone to get the song from YouTube so that she was in time.

Overall it was a great experience to learn from. The main things I will take away from this would be to, plan, plan, plan and also make sure to take lots and lots of shots, so that you always have a back-up if a particular shot doesn’t look right once you’re editing in post-production.