Shooting My Experimental Video

Today I decided that I was ready to shoot my experimental video.  I came to the conclusion that I wanted to film food colouring in water so that I could create surreal images for my film. 

First of all I had to get some food colourings to use for my piece.  Originally I wanted colours such as; blue, green, red, purple and yellow.  Unfortunately when I went top buy them they only had blue, yellow, green and black.  I was unsure about black as I wanted the colours to mix and create new colours, and I thought that black would have dominated the other colours and canceled them out, but I decided to go with black because I didn't think that three colours would have been enough.  I decided that when I was to use the black I would use as little as possible to prevent it turning the water completely black.

I was able to use a clear container to hold the water, this meant that I was able to put the camera underneath the container and still be able to film.  I did plan to use a HD camera to shooting my video, but because the container had to be help above the ground I thought that it would be difficult to put the camera underneath, as this would mean that the container would have to be held higher than it was, which would not have been possible.  I was suggested to use a HD flip camera, which has the looks of a mobile phone, and is extremely easy to use.  This camera differs to the otrher camera because you have no option to manually focus, as it is all done automatically.  Although I orgianlly prefered to film with a HD camera, I think the flip camera was the better option as it made the shoot more fisbale.

Before the shoot I filled the container with water so that it was around one inch deep.  I didnt want to fill the container with too much water becuase I thought that it would require more food colouring, and I needed to make sure I had some left over incase I needed to re-shoot.  I also decided not to use so much water becuase it meant more trips to the tap, which was digging into production time.  To create a surreal image I decided that the container had to be lit so that the water had reflections which reflected against the food colouring.  I decided to go with blue and yellow lighting.  The reason behind this is becuase two of the food colourings that I had where blue and yellow, so I thought that they would match.  I had thought about using red but becuase I was unable to get hold of red food colouring I decided not to. 

Once the camera was rolling I started to rock the container so that the water formed ripples which I thought would look interesting.  I then added my first colour to the water.  I allowed the colouring to set then decided to to shake the container and lift one side so that the colours ran.  I experimented using different colours and how I added them to the water, aswell as where I added them to the water.  At one stage the water got a bit cloudy and there were two thick lumps of food colouring, so I thought it would be a good idea to mix swirl the water with my hand to get the water moving again.  This is probally something that I will edit out because I dont want any body parts in the video, although if I speed it up it might look as obvious that I used my hand.  After about five minutes of filming I decided to stop shooting becuase I thought that I had enough footage for my video.  Once I had finished filming I had a quick preview on the small monitor on the flip camera.  From what I saw I was impressed and it make me wanting to get editting as soon as.

I imported the footage onto the computer and started to view back what I had got.  As I wasnt needing the audio I unlinked it from the video.  To do this I clicked onto the audio that I wanted deleting, then clicked on Clip at the top of the page, I then scrolled down to unlink and unlinked the audio and video, then clicked on the audio on the timeline then deleted.  I didnt really get a lot of editing done today due to production time, but I hope that tomorrow I will possiblty be able to finish editting my experiemental video then think about the audio that I can use for my piece.