Fashion Show


[ Back ] [ Up ] [ Next ]

For several weeks some people within my grade had been organising a fashion show and I was asked to shoot it, I was a little disappointed when I arrived there and found that there were metal girders in the way so that I could not be offset from the stage therefore having to be in the back of the room pointing towards the catwalk.

Intro

During my summer holidays in Rome at Piazza di Spagna in Rom, Italy was a fashion show which took many different cameras, from heavy studio cameras to cameras attached to balloons with jibs, steadycam etc. giving very good coverage of the show. In comparison I had very little when I shot the fashion show, a PC7, a manfrotto tripod as well as a power adaptor to power the camera.

Shooting the show

Shooting the show was hard because I only had one camera and one take so that if I messed up I lost the shot. I worked on getting shots of the people on stage doing their movements keeping wider shots so as to try not to miss anything and I got a fairly high success rate although there are some mistakes which I would like to add here so that people may learn something

 How I worked on shooting the video

The first mistake I made was to use the PC7 since I needed to zoom in on a light, lock the auto exposure so that most of the show was at one exposure therefore I may have used the zoom at inappropriate moments to get an exposure ruining a shot but when this was locked I profited from this because the show was at the same intensity throughout so that if I had needed to do a five minute edit rather than a whole show edit there would have been no problem in using the shots.

The second point here which was annoying was the way it was set up, there was the central ramp as well as wings coming out like a square plane shape. This caused a problem because sometimes people went directly to the front element of the stage while others stopped at the first section so that I found that I had to zoom out to accommodate the shot size and with the zoom on the PC7 being very sensitive I found that there was a rapid zoom out messing up the shot. I don't know whether using the VX-1E may have helped as it is manual but this tended to be a problem, the second part where it may have been useful is for the exposure but that was one less thing to fiddle with therefore it was an advantage.

Other than that I would have liked a second camera for the show so that while one concentrated on getting wide shots the second one could get tighter shots, eg. moving up and down to show the clothes or showing the people's expressions.

Editing

This is an important moment when working on videos since until then we hope we have some useful material and luckily for this edit most of the material was of acceptable quality, there were a few zoom jerks and bad shots but overall I was able to edit and keep the material and the first few minutes were bad because I did not have experience with the situation but as the show progressed there was more material which did not need cutting.

This video was one which was more for the memory of doing the show than for the actual show and the girls who organised it wanted the whole show but for the commercial aspect I edited the video down a little (If it was a five minute video it would be excellent) so that the show remained on the tape removing bad shots such as when the presenters were speaking and cutting directly to the next strut down the catwalk.

Music on the DV tape was good and I counted to a certain extent on people enjoying the music while looking at the video giving it a more dynamic feeling.

Dubbing the edit onto VHS is where the quality loss occurred and the sound too going from DV to VHS.

Marketing the video

In order to sell my video I worked in several ways, firstly before the fashion show the organisers had asked for a copy which I would pass them and later at the actual show some parents asked for copies of the show so I gave them my contact information so that when I had edited the video they may buy a copy. After this I sold my first copy to one of the people in it and getting an advance on the money.

After the show was edited and I had sold a few copies I made some more copies which I sold by going to ask people whether they wanted a copy and although I did not sell many at the point when I am writing this I hope to sell at least 10 more.

Other sections