Cameras

One aspect of our production work that we identified as an important factor was the camera we used. The camera controls many aspects of the visuals of the music video, and the choice of camera has implications on the general quality of the video. Here are some key factors as to what the choice of camera can have an effect on.

• Pixel Resolution: This statistic represents the width and height of the camera footage in pixels, for example 640x400. This can also be abbreviated by the width, for example 720p.
• Aperture: This is depicted by the lens of the camera, which is usually fixed in consumer level cameras. The aperture controls how much light the camera captures. The lower the number, the wider the hole in the centre of the lens, and so the more light the camera captures producing a clearer, brighter picture. This also has an effect on the depth of field; the lower the aperture, the shallower the depth of field.
• FPS: this is how many frames per second the camera captures. This can be an issue when filming fast motion footage such as sports, or when slowing down the footage for a slow motion effect.

Originally we were going to be using the school cameras, but these presented strict limitations to us, refraining us from using particular shots, angles and suchlike. They also limited the quality to that of the camcorder, being about a 640 x 400 resolution.

We sought for an alternative to this, striving for a wider range of focal lengths, better light reception, and higher general quality.

Over the last few years, many D-SLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) cameras have had inbuilt HD movie modes. Though the sound quality is not the standard of the school cameras on these, the visual quality is impeccable as the camera is designed for photography, and the sound quality is unimportant for the shooting of a music video. Photography is one of my personal interests, so I have a few lenses which would fit on a Nikon DSLR, including a Tokina 11-16mm lens. This is an ultra-wide angle lens, and would provide really effective, quirky wide shots of the band. It would also stretch perspectives for shots panning backwards and forwards, creating an interesting, immersive effect.

We have found a friend who we could borrow a Nikon D5000 off; this is the latest standard amateur Nikon camera, featuring a HD 720p movie function.

This camera would allow us to create HD 720p footage, with the quality being the specs of the camera. I have several lenses myself which I could use on this, including the following:

• Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5: This is a standard kit zoom lens, with a reasonably low aperture, allowing light capture in dark conditions.
• Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8: This is an ultra-wide angle lens, with a low aperture which would be very efficient in capturing low light footage.
• Nikkor 50mm f/1.8: This is a fixed focal length lens, with an extremely low aperture. This allows for telephoto shots in very dark light, and also having a very shallow depth of field, putting the background (or foreground) completely out of focus, an effect we consider desirable in our filming.

All of these lenses create effects that we intended to use in our video, and so using this Nikon DSLR can capture all of these to create a generally higher quality video, with a range of lens based effects.