Production
40, The Shoot Day Schedule
After our Foundation Portfolio, Tashfa and I were certain that we wanted to complete our shooting process in one day, because splitting it into different days would have been logistically impractical and chaotic.
Here is a rough schedule I made to ensure we could manage and keep track of time. We ended up following it quite well.
11:45 A.M: Being the extremely punctual person Esha Durrani is, she picked Tasha up exactly on time (she will be early to everything except her classes.
11:45 A.M - 12:15 PM: Esha and Tashfa travel to their location whilst mutually bonding on Joji's music.
12:15 PM - 12:45 PM: Esha and Tashfa arrive to the Lahore Heritage Club and explore the location.
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12:45 PM - 3:45: Esha and Tashfa took around 2.5 hours to shoot with small 10 minute breaks in between to discuss any ideas that may come on spot. This time also included the time taken up to set up the props, for example, blocking out the pages and putting the blindfold on Tashfa After an evaluation of shots, they realized that they have enough and left the location at around 4 P.M.
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41, The Camerawork
Because I had to film our video, I had to ensure that our camera work was on par so that we could portray our concept properly and in a visually appealing way. The following factors were kept into consideration when filming:
1, Focus
The shots had to be clear and focused in order to be usable. This meant that I had to be vary of taking blurry shots or shots that were not filling the frame accurately, or else they would have been deemed low quality.
2, Lighting
The camera had to pick up lighting from the location therefore it was essential to take shots with just the right lighting according to what was needed. Another way to control this using my camera's settings was to change the ISO and exposure settings.
3, Angle
It was essential to have a wide array of angles including long-shots, mid-shots, close-ups and establishing shots. This was important so that the shots don't seem monotonous and similar, which creates a rather boring effect. for Therefore it was a good idea to keep revising my angles as I was shooting and experimenting with unique angles such as canted angles.
4, Stability
The shots had to be stable and not shaky, because that would have made the video look quite rough and unpolished.
5, Duration
I had to be careful about the duration of the shots because even though we planned to have shorter clips in the video, I had to take shots that were long enough to trim. Longer shots (such as the hallway shot) also needed to have a good duration in case the lens lost focus in between and I had to split it.
42, Behind The Picture Perfect Editing
What you'll soon see in our final product was not all that went into it. In fact, there was a lot of work that went into it behind the camera. Here is video I made recapping our behind the scenes experience that I also ended up posting on our social media profile.
Here is a video of Tashfa and I that can be best described as "these two women were confident in their work and had no idea that a truck was about to hit them."
Here is the post Tashfa wrote on our behind the scenes crusade:
43, Inspirations and Improvisations
Although I had to shoot our video, there was a slight potential problem - I had never been to the Lahore Heritage Club before and was therefore not very familiar with the layout of the building and all the items available to us. This however, did not end up being an issue for us in any way, because Tashfa was able to describe it to me and sent me a bunch of videos before we even finalized our location, and I had a fair idea of where everything was. There were some things that she hadn't shown me before, mainly because they were part of a newly set-up exhibition, and we were able to improvise and use them as well. Here are some objects that particularly inspired me that we hadn't planned on using before:
This wall with cassette tapes was an instant attraction for me, given that it symbolized music in a rather creative and aesthetically pleasing way. I took multiple pictures of this for our social media (and also ended up using one of them for our audience research form's header). This wall turned out to be the first shot of our music video (apologies for the spoiler)
This mirror adjacent to the library also piqued my interest. We had already decided to show Tashfa's reflections in a mirror, but I thought it would be interesting to utilize a mirror to show the library as well.
Tashfa had shown me the corridor/hallway before, but I did not know that there were multiple lights that I could experiment with. I chose to turn all the lights off and have the lights on for the relic/art rooms to create more depth and give off a rather eerie feeling of being trapped.
It's true when they say a girl likes flowers, because my primary attraction to this vase was just how pretty the flowers were, which would have added more visual appeal to our video. I also admired the lighting in the hall, which made everything shot here appear much more natural.
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We did not initially plan on taking any shots in the store room because it would have been dirty and clustered, but we saw a mannequin there which we really wanted to include in our video to amplify our concept of a woman feeling loss because it was faceless.
I saw these clovers and instantly connected them to a symbol of hope and luck, therefore they made a good improvised addition to our video.
44, Recounting My Production Experience (adventure)
My production experience was rather fun (and much smoother than my AS portfolio shooting days went). We did not face any major issues such as equipment failure or a lack of footage, but we did face some minor setbacks.
Tashfa and I faced our first problem 15 minutes into shooting - neither of us had ever played the piano before. We wanted to include a shot of Tashfa playing the piano because it is a quite common instrument used in alt/indie music, and therefore would have been a conventional prop. Our course of action was to simply pretend to play the piano (and trust me, the sounds it gave off were anything but pleasant). You'll soon see the outcome of that particular shot and if we ended up choosing it or not in the post-production category.
Another issue we faced was finding an appropriate book to find that Tashfa would pick up and read. This process occupied around 10-15 minutes, because we had to scour the library to find something with a title that resonates with feminism or freedom, and we ended up finding just the perfect book - "A Place Called Freedom". However, we could not damage any property, so we had to black out text of a book Tashfa brought from home. This also took considerable time, and I realized that we should have probably done this before our shoot began.
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The inspirational piano that neither of us knew how to play.
An Esha taking 2049085208 shots of the book we found after an excruciating search.
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Blacking out Tashfa's book (she was screaming internally)
The biggest challenge I faced during our shoot, and possibly the entire duration of our project from October-April (and this is in no way an exaggeration) was leaving the location and encountering a cat outside. To give you some context, I have a chronic fear of cats (they will eat me). Tashfa however, was very understanding (after she made fun of me for 5 whole minutes and took the picture below) and helped me get out.
Overall, I would say that out shoot day went pretty well and was a great way for Tashfa and I to bond and come up with even more impromptu ideas.