Well, a friend of mine's band is looking for me to do their first narrative video. I'm conceptualizing with them now and we've come up with some strong ideas. It will be a video that's split between shots of the band and a storyline and will be shot with one camera...An example of the shotlist:

BAND ROOM; INT - DAY

0:00 – 0:02

C/U Snare-Hit

0:02 – 0:04

C/U - Hi-Hat

0:04 - 0:08

C/U - Hand striking chord, pick slide up fretboard.

0:08 – 0:13

W/S of band.

0:13 – 0:16

M/S - Guitarist 1

0:16 – 0:18

M/S - Guitarist 2

0:18 – 0:20

M/S - Bassist

0:20 – 0:22

M/S - Drummer

0:22 – 0:26

C/U - Vocalist’s mouth opening wider with the scream.

BEDROOM; INT - DAY

0:26 – 0:29

W/S – Character lying face down in bed and reaching for a bottle of vodka on a bedside table.

I obviously have the vision worked out, and it will be storyboarded, but how should it be filmed?

For the band shots, should they just mime-play through their song ten or so times while the original is being played in the background and I film it from each angle so I have a full song from ten different shots or should I shoot per the shotlist (two seconds of the snare drum, 5 seconds of the guitarist)?

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I'd do the full song from each setup. Tape's cheap (though time isn't). That give you plenty of options in post in case the cuts you visualized don't work smoothly when you actually see them together. Note - everyone except the drummer can mime their playing and vocal but the drummer has to actually play for it to look real. Don't forget earplugs! Record the song as you will use it in the soundtrack for them to play to rather than trying to record the playback to tape in the camera on set. In other words. the music they're miming to should be the actual recording you're going to use for the soundtrack in the production. Load it into the editor intact and cut picture to it.

Yep, that was the plan, music plays in background during the shoot and I cut to the full track in post. I'll put up a copy once it's done :)

I've been watching this relatively low-budget video, http://download.yousendit.com/5EEE43E83525E0E4 and seeing as it's just shots of the band with no narrative cutaways, I'm wondering how it was shot. There seems to be a cut roughly every two seconds but from quite interesting angles. Do you think the play-the-song-through-as-many-times-as-it-takes method was used here? Or do you think they knew that there'd be one second longhigh-angle shot and so they just filmed that for ten seconds?