Practical DV FilmMaking
Once you could edit digitally, it was a short step away to manipulate each of those digital frames using other software. In 1986, former Apple boss Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilms computer graphics division for $10 million. Renamed Pixar, their early films went one stage further by creating images wholly on computers, and this process of computer-generated images (CGI) has since made its way into almost every kind of movie today, whether it is to paint out an errant catering truck in the corner of a frame or the wires holding up an actor, or creating entire objects to interact with live action, such as hurricanes (Twister) or aliens (The Abyss). By 2004, films such as Sky Captain and The Polar Express pointed to a whole new method of making films, where real action is captured on computer and used to animate objects and people.
In 1992, a theatre was hired by Sony Pictures and used as an experiment with Pacific Bell to give the world a first view of digital cinema to an audience of several hundred. Rather than having to make a celluloid version of a digital movie so it could be shown on celluloid projectors, a digital projector introduced the idea that films could be digitally shot, digitally edited and finally digitally exhibited.
In the mid-1990s, the idea of connecting PCs together took off when the Internet, formerly a system for hitching up university computers to share research between institutions, became the must-have addition for home PC users.
Advances in compression had been swift and by 1998 the compact disc was being used to hold entire feature films, using enhanced dual-layer discs and MPEG-2 compression - more of which in Chapter 3:2.
By the turn of the millennium, digital cinemas were becoming a reality for audiences in North America. On 19 June 1999, Fox and LucasFilms staged Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace in four theatres using digital projectors. A few years before, a low-budget movie called The Last Broadcast became, with no irony, the first to be broadcast by satellite to a theatre in a move that could yet pose the biggest threat to the mighty distributors.
Into the millennium, high definition (HD) video has pushed the boundaries of what filmmakers can use, doubling the lines of recorded video and kick-starting the possibility of HD-TV for consumers.
But filmmakers have found out that recording HD is one thing but getting it to squeeze onto tapes is quite another. Video compression may have to take another huge leap forward before consumers and low-budget filmmakers can use this new format. It also asks filmmakers to consider the question of whether picture clarity is the holy grail after all.
All this talk of technology can lose sight of what it was that these pioneers in DV were trying to achieve. Ultimately, it was about the art and craft of filmmaking and of storytelling. Like the Gutenberg printing press, which placed the printed spread of information in the hands of the masses, DV technology has enabled more to be produced with less, and by more people.
For all its being showered with new toys and gadgets each year, filmmaking remains an art form, concerned with images and story.
The Crunch
• Become technical - most artists have to work at this bit, but it is worth it because you are in control
• Get to know about broadcast standards for your country or the place you might want to show your work
• Analog is long gone - digital is going to give you better results
• FireWire is good - you need it.
