The Strangers - Live performance

Today we filmed a band called the Strangers In the pit, we used the pit as it has two levels allowing us to do birds eye view shots. Within my group there was four of us with a camera each which allowed us to get movement and angles from all different directions. We asked them to play this (Strangers - In Chaos) song as we felt the drum, vocals and piano were all very pronounced and each played their own part allowing us to focus on all of them at different times within the song giving us a variation.

This is the formation of how we set up the cameras. red - the cameras. the arrows representing movement, one camera as a dolly and the other as a steady cam. The outer square is the balcony (upper floor) and the inner square is the ground floor.  

At lunch we held a gig in the pit in which the Strangers performed to the rest of the school, It would of been nice to shoot with an audience there to get a real atmosphere going however unfortunately it wasn't possible.
By only having one chance to shoot everything live and getting everything exact was hard, as you had to be constantly moving to allow the video to flow with different shots and movement.

This is our final edit of the live music performance.


We worked as a team using simple editing techniques such as cutting and dragging. We used markers to match up the lip singing to the song and to get everything in sync with the music. Most of the time we searched through each 4 of the cameras movements to see which one looked best to add in then, however sometimes when we felt none of the footage particularly worked well and therefore used another point in the song which we felt still worked and therefore used that, The original plan was to edit 30 seconds of the video over 3 hours, however we felt we finished fairly quickly and carried on editing the song until we had ran out of time. We managed to get most of the song finished however near the ending of the song we used one shot to finish off the last couple of seconds (the camera at the bottom left of the diagram facing the band) as it zooms out at the song fades which we felt worked particularly well and fitted with the songs movements. I am very happy with how the video has turned out as at first i was unsure as it was live and we were unsure as to the movements the band would make and how you have to be constantly thinking of different shots and timing however i believe it worked out really well and am pleased with the outcome. It has taught we how much i need to plan ahead down to the last detail within my music video (e.g. the lighting and the movement of the actors as if one of the actors move past the lighting the whole shot will the ruined) and how important it is to get the lip syncing exact otherwise it wont look good.