Lighting & Set Design

Lighting

When talking through our ideas, we didn't want any low-key lighting as that would take away from our positive mood. We took inspiration from the following videos when we decided on using lots of different coloured backgrounds to give the video a playful feeling:

Dog is Dead - Do the Right Thing

Mcfly - Love is on the Radio

George Ezra - Budapest

Darwin Deez - Radar Detector

Little Mix - Move

Before production started, we had an opportunity to go into the studio and do some tests with the lighting to see what might work. We worked out that we would need 24 different coloured backgrounds, some of which we saved during the test so that we would have easy access to them during our shoots.

me saving some of the lighting set-ups

The main issue we faced when lighting the set was getting enough light to fill the set and light the performers, but not so much that it washed out the coloured background. This is something that we decided we would be able to enhance in post-production.

Set Design

We decided that we had 2 main set-ups:

1. Performance set-up: This set-up included the drum kit in the centre of the frame and amps on either side of the drum kit. The influences we got for this arrangement are shown below:

The 1975 - Girls

Biffy Clyro - Mountains 

Blink 182 - All the Small Things

Green Day - Basket Case 

Band of Skulls - Nightmares 

Muse - Uprising

We decided to stick to the convention that all of the videos above conform to, which is that the drum kit is always behind the rest of the band. At one point, we considered breaking this by using jump-cuts to move the band around in the set, but this proved inefficient for the time we had. The amps being on either side of the drum kit was also a convention that we picked up on, possibly to not draw attention away from the performers.

We also decided to have me on the left of frame as people usually 'read' images from left to right, and so I am seen first as I am the lead singer of the band. Below is an initial design we made before production to give us a better visual idea of where we would all be spaced on the set.

2. Prop set-up

This set-up is effectively an empty set with us playing with props. Occasionally we will have a table on set for playing Monopoly or if we need to raise something. I main influence for this was the music video for Mcfly's 'Love is on the Radio'.

empty set with props