PRACTICAL DV FILMMAKING

Practical DV FilmMaking

• Overview
• Inside video
• Films and how they work
• Pre-production
• Production tools
• Production aesthetics
• Post-production tools
• Post-production aesthetics
• Careers and distribution
• Mapping the industry
• Glossary of film and video terms

Project 1. In-camera edit: hand-made movie

What this project is for: to learn about manual settings in shooting Time: allow about three hours

What this project is for

The aim of this film is to encourage you to use the camera with complete control over every aspect of what it is doing. Cameras are easy: they do what you want, when you want, but they let you down when it comes to helping you be creative. Indeed, the aim of every camera manufacturer is to make life eas­ier for you. But you don't want an easy life; that's why you are trying to make films, so we need to tell the camera to listen and do it your way.

To achieve this, we will make a short film that is made with the camera on manual settings throughout. If you have to resort to using automatic settings, it is so that you can deceive the camera, but more on this later. As with other films in this book, we need to make it short, lasting less than four minutes. The film is going to made in-camera, so you will be shooting each shot as you need them in the order they appear.

Stage 1

In this film, the subject matter is not the most critical element; it is no more than a vehicle for the actions and movement of the camera. The theme running through this film (it is too open-ended to call it a story) is titled A Day in the Life.

The film is going to follow you as you go through a typical day, encountering various situations and people. Since you have to keep the movie short, it might be useful to divide the film into sections, look­ing at different parts of your day. It may sound like a simple film, but many films are extremely neat in their ideas. Consider Kevin Smith's stunning debut feature, Clerks (1994), which was filmed entirely in the New Jersey shop where he worked. Smith manages to make one location and very little else go a long way, turning in a film which catapulted him into the big time. Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise achieves a similar feat in a few streets in Paris.

Stage 2

Spend some time getting to know what the manual features on your camera are there for. Look at the guide to camera features elsewhere in this chapter and look to see what yours has. Check:

• Where are the manual and auto buttons (if yours has manual override)?

• Have you got a manual focus ring?

• Have you got manual iris control (aperture)?

• Have you got manual white balance?

• How about manual shutter speed?

Stage 3

Choose a day and start filming. Shoot some shots of, for