Location: Bristol Ice Rink

I wrote a letter to the manager of the Bristol Ice Rink in order to convince him to let me use the ice rink for filming. It would normally cost £300-£400 pounds to hire the ice rink; but with a lot of persistence and a bit of luck I managed to get the ice rink available for about 2 hours for absolutely free.

Redcliffe Sixth Form Centre
Dulverton House
Redcliff Hill
Bristol
BS1 6RB
07960217025

Bristol Ice Rink

Frogmore StreetBristol
BS1 5NA
UK


18th October 2010


Dear Sir/Madam,

I am a student from St Mary’s Redcliffe Sixth Form Centre who is currently studying Media Studies at A2 Level. I have been assigned to create a music video for an unsigned band.

The band, ‘In Your Honour’ is made up of students from St Bredan’s Sixth Form. They have been recognised by the media (The Guardian, The Times and various music magazines) as a very talented and creative young group of musicians.

We would be very grateful if we could use your venue for an hour of filming. We would not need any skate hires as we don’t intend to use the ice to skate at all. There will be 8 of us including the band.

We are available to come and do the filming any time during the whole week. Special thanks to the Bristol Ice Rink will be mentioned in the music video.





Yours Faithfully

signature


Cliffy Nelson
(Student)

Filming on the Ice Rink

I managed to arrange transport for the band and equipment. Once we all got there setting up the equipment took a lot of time since we had to make sure not to damage the ice. It took about 45 minutes to set up the lighting and equipment leaving us with just over an hour of filming. Due to this I wasn't able to do many experimental shots and had to multi-task quite a lot; operating several cameras and getting multiple shots done at the same time.

The video camera quality wasn't as good as thought they would be. Also it was quite hard to panning shots on the ice. I tried using ice skates to get the panning shots but they were still too shaky. More time to do the filming would have been useful too.

I am really grateful to the manager of the Bristol ice rink and all the staff who were very supportive and helpful. Also grateful to the band and the supporting film crew.