Steal them until you can afford to rent them.
Just use common sense and don’t get caught (e.g.
film the gunplay away from the tourists).|
Independent Digital Feature Production Creating Digital Movies |
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| Home | Pre-Production | Production | Post-Production | STOP |
Steal them until you can afford to rent them.
Just use common sense and don’t get caught (e.g.
film the gunplay away from the tourists).
Use whatever you’ve got or can afford. I started
STOP
with an analog Hi-8 camera but the quality
and the difficulty of converting the video to a
digital format for editing made me go out and buy
a Sony DCR-HC20 MiniDV camera. I’d highly recommend
the MiniDV format for those who
don’t have unlimited funds. It looks good, it’s affordable, it’s digital,
and it’s easy to manipulate in a digital editing environment.
I’d also recommend a tripod for steady shots and a
home-built steadicam
for camera movement. I adapted
Johnny Chung Lee’s design to make the steadicam I use in
STOP.
I won’t say much about framing because this is where the art of filmmaking and the director’s individual taste and creativity comes to the fore, but make sure you capture the action you need to tell your story in a creative way.
Set your focus, exposure, and white balance to manual and learn how to use them. Experiment. Keep your image in focus (unless it’s out of focus for a stylistic reason). A good trick is to zoom in close to the central character or object, focus, and then zoom out for the shot. Exposure should be altered until the image is dark enough to capture all the tonal detail (but not too dark). A good practice is to use the camera’s auto-exposure as an initial setting and then use your eye for a final adjustment. Bring a white piece of paper to help set your white balance. Have your on-camera character hold the white paper, zoom in until the paper fills the entire frame, then set the white balance. Zoom out for the shot.
Turn off your image stabilization for tripod shots as it degrades your image but turn it on for steadicam shots.
For STOP I chose to light in a documentary style to make the film seem more real (and because we didn’t have the time, freedom, or budget to set up large lighting rigs at borrowed locations). By this I mean the scenes used natural and existing lighting (i.e. turning on every light in the place) supplemented by a cheap hanging work lamp from Home Depot. I’d put in the brightest bulb I could find and then use whatever was available for a diffuser (a piece of paper, gym socks, etc.) I’d just need to make sure the diffuser didn’t burst into flames.
Getting good live sound is often harder than recording
the corresponding video. The Sony HC20 camera’s onboard
microphone did not provide great audio, so I bought a cheap
Audio-Technica ATR55 Shotgun microphone that attaches to
the top of the camera. Having a directional microphone
like this can help to pick up the actor’s lines more
effectively in a noisy location.
It’s also a good idea to ask your cast and crew (if any) to be quiet for 30 seconds so you can record some ambient sound from the location. This will be invaluable if you have to plug any sound holes in post-production.
The better you can record the live sound of your actors on location the better your final product will turn out (and the less work you’ll have to do after wrapping the production process.)
Bring lots of fully charged spare batteries. Running out of power on location after the difficult process of bringing everyone together makes you a big idiot.
Copyright © 2006 Malcolm Ferrier