MTV Freshers Tour 2013

It has been a long time since I wrote a blog post about the work I have been doing so I will be posting a few over christmas about what I have been up to. I am going to start off by talking about the most recent MTV tour I was on. At first when I got asked just before we started back in september, I didn't think it would be a great idea to go and film a 19 date tour as well as trying to work on my dissertation. But after a few chats with Mike and my parents, I accepted the Job. it was an opportunity I would have been stupid to miss out on. It was a chance to earn myself a very good wage and an opportunity to really show my potential to MTV. Their was a few things I had to make sure I had had before starting the tour, one of them being a good quality portable hard drive. I knew I was going to have to carry hours of footage so I needed to make sure I had something new and reliable. I also Invested in another hard drive to back up my portable hard drive incase anything happened to it. I was sure it was going to take a battering with all of the travelling so I needed to make sure I had everything backed up. I will write a blog post about my hard drives and file management within the next few days as it is an important thing when it comes to investments when working within the professional industry and especially for a company like MTV. This was by far my biggest job to date but also I was about to start my biggest year at uni which meant I had to be on the ball and very organised.  With it being my 3rd tour with MTV, I knew their was a chance to get my foot in the door for when I finish Uni, so actually you can say its perfect timing.

After each event, to help myself I needed to make sure all of my footage was taken off my camera and put on my hard drive. With us travelling a lot, sometimes everyday of the week. I didn't have time to leave footage on my camera and sort it out the next day. Unlike the last tour I did ((The Summer Ball Tour) I was filming for 1 one 4 minute edit. So I really needed to be selective with what I was filming instead of capturing hours of footage each night which would have been a pain to sort out when I eventually started to edit. Each night I went in knowing what I wanted to capture, some nights the venues where on another level compared to others so sometimes I focused on getting nice wide shots showing off both the crowd and venue. Some nights were in smaller venues which meant I could focus on people dancing, grabbing some vox pops from the students etc. On average, I finished the night with about 20 minutes worth of footage, plenty to work but not too much. 

I was shooting my footage on my 7d with a 24mm f1.4 which was a great combination. I shot at 60fps on the 7d so I could slow the footage down nicely without it starting to jump frame. the 24mm f1.4 was a recent investment that I love. Being about to shoot wide and at such a low aperture is a dream, especially when you are working in low light situations like clubs. Because of the cropped sensor 24mm turned into about 35-40mm which was still a nice focal length. Because my work expands outside of the promotional video, the move to a full frame body was on my mind. I do a lot of photography work as you all know so I really wanted to make the move to full frame because I knew it was going to give me a bit more creative freedom and I would be able to make the most out of my lenses. Eventually I made the move and invested in a 5d mark ii which was in MINT condition. It was a dream shooting at 24mm at f1.4. My 50mm f1.5 was also 50mm which turned it from a good lens to an amazing lens. On the down side, I wasn't able to shoot at 60 fps any longer, the highest frame rate on the mark ii was 30fps. Luckily It was more the back end of the tour so I have plenty of 60fps footage to work with. Again I will post more about the move to 5d in the near future. 

When we eventually finished the tour mid october, I was prepared enough to go straight into the edit. I didn't want it hanging around because 1: I wanted to show MTV I can turn around work fast and 2: I didn't want it to get in the way of my dissertation. There was a few things that was required in the video. I needed to make sure I established it was lots of cities and I needed to show the artists we worked with on tour. So thats it for this blog post. Please check out my final edit below. I am very happy with it and I hope you enjoy.