Powder Paint Fight: Review

We only had one take for this shoot as the powder paint so it was essential that we stuck to our plans or it would come at a great cost to us.

To make sure we were organised, we briefed the actors with what they would need, what we were bringing, times and locations etc. We arrived half an hour earlier to set up the camera and do some test shots. We also set up the powder paint and put the rest of the equipment we were't using out of the way so it wouldn't get covered in paint.

We set the camera to shoot 50fps rather than 25fps so that when we slow it down in editing it will be a smoother shot. We waited till it got darker which was around 7pm, and because the actors had arrived at 6.30, we were able to get the most of our shooting time.

We only had one chance to film all the actors whilst they were clean as once the first handful of paint was thrown that was that, so we ensured we got all of the footage we needed for that particular setup.

We then got a wide range of different shots of the paint fight that we could edit together. We instructed the actors to throw it in different sequences and at different people, making their throws as exaggerated as possible. We also took some close up static shots to provide a contrast and also to make the footage more intimate.


Overall the shooting went really well and we all thought it was very successful. The paint showed up really well and the lighting was really good too. I also think that the costumes suited the convention of the image we are creating as they enabled us to show the effect the powder paint has when thrown.

If we were to do it again I think we would have got more powder paint and shot even more footage just to be certain that we had enough shots. However we ar confident that we have enough shots to use.

The only real problem we found was that one of our couples said they couldn't do it last minute, and neither of our reserves were available either! We managed to get a third girl but we couldn't find another partner to match it. We were definitely not going to reschedule, so to ended up having three girls versus two guys which in the end didn't look that bad at all and wasn't such a disaster.