Production - 1st filming day from my perspective

Our first day of filming occurred in Tottenham Court Road, Morwell Street. The experience went well although we had a couple of minor problems. The first problem was because Nimar had only memorised the lyrics for the first half of the song due to a misunderstanding that we would only produce half of the song. But this was very easily solved by giving him a couple of minutes to memorise the rest of the song. The following problem was, Mahbuba's battery died and she was the only one who had the song in the phone. Although I try to make sure our group is fully prepared and organised, this event could be blamed in a slight lack of preparation as we didn't realise we would need to play the song for a very long time several times. This was also easily solved by charging her phone in a cafe and she sent the song to Tavo's phone and my phone.

The filming during the day worked well, I believe our camera man (Gustavo) produced some nice sitting in the pavement base tracks creating an interesting perspective by filming on the floor (directly in the same level as our artist) and framing him adequately. We have also found an interesting wall in which we created an improvised base track. One problem with our location was only that Tavo had to film in the middle of the street and although there wasn't a lot of movement, sometimes cars would interfere in our production.

We thought that the lamps in the street would be enough to provide us light at the night shots, but when it got darker we realised light could be a problem. This was solved by using a lantern from Tavo's phone. The night shots worked quite well but not as well as the day shots. We haven't filmed so much at night, but we got a couple of base tracks, which watching it in the computer do seem a bit dark, but we are dealing with it in the editing.

This day we had to reshoot the same shots a few times because Nimar took a bit of time to get the performance right (mostly it was either the lyrics or he lost the focus). Sometimes I had to remember him to put some emotion into the singing, but I believe that in the end he did quite a good job as a performer in the footage we have. It was also very cold and it was quite difficult for him to bear with the temperature because of his costume, as well as it was difficult for him to play the guitar, but I believe he did the best that he could so I am quite happy with his performance.