Faking Tears for an A

During the first part of our first film session, my partner and I had one goal in mind. This was to find the best way to do the transition between present scenes and the memory scenes in the music video. Our original plan was to film two scenes from the same spot and with the same angle and layer the videos on top of each other so I as the actor could appear twice in the same shot. But we ran into some limitations with this. The first and more obvious one was that since we didn't have thousand-dollar camera equipment we couldn't film any pans, tracking shots, or follow shots. This is because we wouldn't be able to move the camera at the exact same speed and exact same angle to line them up perfectly in post-production. The second limitation of this was that we weren't exactly sure how to layer the shots seamlessly onto one another. We tried several editing platforms but we realized quickly that we would need to spend a significant amount of money on an editing platform that could do this. So the backup plan for this was to just film two shots with a tripod so that the camera didn't move and fade the shots into each other in post-production. This still had the first limitation of not being able to move the camera but we could do this for free. The next thing we did was decorate the settings we filmed in with Christmas decorations. We put a reef on my door, nutcrackers by the door, and Christmas towels next to the oven. Once this was done we started to film each scene in chronological order of our video which means our first shot was the one of me entering my house and looking over to my couch. We decided to film one scene and then take a lunch break and plan the rest of the scenes after. The formula for each shot was pretty similar. We started off by figuring out where the actor is going to start and stop in each scene. Then based on what shot and angle we wanted to use we would place the camera in a place where it can pan to capture the actor in the scene. After that, we would figure out where the two actors in the memory scene needed to be to fit into the frame. Now for the actual filming, we used a medium shot that originally has the door at center frame but once I walk into the frame the camera pans to track me while I keep my head down to appear sad. And after we filmed this scene we couldn't touch the camera and I changed my costume into a different hoodie and my co-actor and I sat on the couch for the following scene.