Live Event Video

This year in PLP we have been working on making videos and video production. For one of our assignments we had to film a live event, something that was happening in our neighbourhood or nearby. I have been behind in my assignments due to a concussion, which has been hard, but one positive thing came out of it. The timing for filming an exciting event happening on my own doorstep was perfect. My live event video is our Halloween fireworks show.

On our Fall Field Training Exercise with Cadets, we purchased some fireworks and had a lot of fun setting them off. Everyone loves a good fireworks show and with Halloween coming it gave me the idea of lighting fireworks and filming it. My dad went out and bought a big thing fireworks so we had lots. 

We had to use different filming techniques and angles for our live event, some of them required planning and set up ahead of time. Below is my plan for what shots I needed to include in the video and what parts of the live event I was going to use each technique for. I wanted to capture the sunset and trick-or-treaters arriving in time-lapse because I thought it would be a good introduction and look really cool. I set up a video camera for a time lapse shot outside my bedroom window to capture the sun going down. Then I set up my camera outside of my house on the front porch to show all the trick-or-treaters walking up the front porch and getting candy. After the time lapse introduction to set the scene, we move on to the main event, the fireworks.

We had a ton of fireworks and I got to share them with my friends and family so everyone had a chance to set some off. I have a shot of me lighting one, and as soon as this ends we have a close up of the firework. In class we talked a lot about having different angles and that you can use multiple cameras running at once. I took this into consideration when filming my video. I have several different angles of the firework show: one was from a still camera, one was from an iPhone, and one was from a Go Pro on my head. The use of multiple cameras to film multiple different things, such as time lapse, slow-motion, first person perspective, and still shots, gave a lot of interesting footage to work with. I interviewed my brother and my girlfriend Bari to get both of their reactions to the fireworks and what it was like to light them. They had a blast as you can see from their reactions in the video.  

The cool part about filming a live event video is you never know what you are going to get. Like Jackson running down my street in the middle of the show (sorry Jackson, you got edited out!).

The hard part was planning to film everything at once to get different shots and perspectives. If something went wrong with one of the set ups, there wasn’t a second chance to get the shot. 

All in all, I really had a lot of fun filming this video, and not just because I got to blow things up.