Digital News - Shoot at Tesco

On Friday 7th October myself, Ellen and Niki went to the Forum Tesco in Sittingbourne to film our first interview package for our Digital News. We aimed to get there for 10:30am to enable us to have plenty of time to prepare for our shoot as neither of the other two girls had been there before. 
Unfortunately the girls were running a little late due to transport so I went in and met the store manager David, who showed me where it would be that we would be filming and allowed me time to sort out the kit so that it would be safe before I briefed him on what we planned to do. David said that there were a couple of issues with what we wanted to do, which was to film out on the shop floor. He explained that it wouldn't be possible to film on the shop floor due to customers and branding copyright. We would have had to have contacted Tesco head office press release for us to have full permission to do this so David allowed us to compromise and film in the back office/training room. He allowed us to dress the set however we wanted and was incredibly accommodating in spite of the short notice. The other members of Tesco staff were also unbelievable helpful and actually allowed us to be the first people to actually see and use their voting box which they brought out to the back for us to incorporate into the mise en scene. They also allowed us to use several Tesco bags to dress the set also. Here is what the finished set dress looked like. I'm, very pleased with how it turned out because it allowed us to make the best of our surroundings and link nicely to the interview's subject. 

Once the girls had arrived we set the rest of the kit up and made sure that everything was in working order and that any problems that could potentially have arisen we could work around. We found that there was a big interference occurring with the Rode Mic so we had to make the decision to just use the clip mic and the Zoom which I set up on the table seen in the right hand picture. We did some test shots of framing and as the director I suggested ways to make the shot look more creative. 

 Here are some of the test shot framing we did:

 The first test shot we did we decided was just a bit too close for the feel we wanted to achieve with this interview, we also couldn't see everything in the background. We also didn't like the shadow that was cast against the wall from the voting box so we tried to amend it in the next shot.

The second time after we re adjusted, looked much better, we could see clearly the background and the shadow had diminished by a fair amount. We moved the chair closer to the box so that we could still get a nice mid shot of the interviewee in the first third and see the set dress also. We used this shot size because we are presuming that the person is taller than Ellen is so that they won't have as much head room. 


When we actually came to shoot, the compliance manager Dan was the only person we planned to have the interview with. However, David said he'd like to be involved in the shoot as he may have a better understanding of how to answer certain questions that Dan may not be able to answer. This meant that we had to re consider how to set the shot up. We decided to have one person on either side of the voting box so that we could have them both on a third and still incorporate the background dress. Looking back on the footage now, I would have like to have taken some lights with us, just to lift the production values and also perhaps ask the two interviewees to swap seats as there is a noticeable height difference that might not have been so obvious had they been sitting in opposite places. 



Overall, I am very pleased with how the shoot went and I thought we worked very well as a team. I think it was a good idea to have gotten there at least an hour before the shoot was scheduled as it gave us time to think and test shoot in our surroundings, preparing us for the interview so that we come across as professional and organised. We managed to get a set up shot of the two on the shop floor so long as we adhered to their rules and I am pleased with how they have turned out also. We haven't got the cutaways that we originally hoped for but we worked well as a team to make the best of our situation and will have a good choice in the edit to make relevant cut aways. 

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