Filming - Week One

On the first day of filming, our group went to Manchester City Centre to film parts of our music video. As soon as we set off the bus we walked around the side streets of Manchester filming handheld for what we planned would be used for a slide guitar part in the song, and be a "trippy" part of it as well, as loads of effects were planned to be used.

We then went to the Arndale centre, where we attempted to film the "narrative" of the song, which is basically about a joker and a thief and then the rest is hard to decipher, so we tried to interpret it as best as we could. We also experimented with our first use of Lip Syncing, with Alex and Chris being the first to do it, by miming the dialogue parts of the song. And we also tried acting out parts of the song. The staircases in the Arndale centre were perfect as they had iron-barred gates which went along perfectly with the lyric "There must be some kind of way out of here / Said the Joker to The Thief" and we used them in our acting. We also took shots of the city to serve as establishing shots.

The original plan was to use these, alternating between David as Jimi Hendrix playing, and Chris and Alex playing the Joker and the Thief, however, we deemed the first day of shooting not a failure, but unusable as the narrative of the song made no sense to us, no matter how hard we tried to make it work, as it doesn't work in a linear fashion. Although non-linear does work, but for our video it would have to have been linear and a story that starts backwards was simply too hard to replicate.

On the second day of filming David finally got his Jimi Hendrix costume, and we started filming what would be most of the guitar angles and establishing shots of the music video. We at first tried to scale a wall that could give us a very nice high angle shot of David walking, but when Chris tried to walk from one side to another he was blocked by an iron fence, so we tried another way near the sewage works only we couldn't get the gear up the tree and onto the wall, so we left that alone. We then climbed one more tree and got an okay shot from it but we never used it in the end. It was during this time we first encountered the problems of the fake Moustache that David had with his costume, and they would only increase as the weeks moved on.