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

Colour temperature (measured in degrees kelvin) affects the colour of the light we see. For example, a candle gives off a very orange, warm cast of colour, while daylight on a late afternoon in winter would give off a bluish cast. If you have standard household bulbs in the kitchen, they may give an orange tint to the film, while fluorescent strip lighting can give a greenish cast. However, none of this would be picked up as the camera removes some of the extra colour. But what happens if you want extra orange? How does the picture look? For this, you may have to resort to the automatic white balance if no other option is available, but at this point run through the manual options it gives you (if any). Some cam­eras suggest a few settings for the most common lighting situations: indoor, outdoor, bright day, cloudy

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day and so on. Try out some of these settings incorrectly. If you try, for instance, cloudy outdoor set­tings for shooting in your kitchen it will assume that there is a dominance of blue in the scene, which would occur in this kind of light, and balance it with taking away some of the blue. The net effect is a kitchen more orange than usual, as what little blue there was is turned down even further.

Shutter speed

If your camera has options for changing the shutter speed you can alter these to take into account dif­ferent situations. Shutter speed refers to the amount of time it takes the camera to open and close the shutter. A fast car, at close range, will appear blurred unless a higher (or faster) shutter speed is used (for example, from 1/125 to 1/400). However, faster shutter speeds need higher light levels, so altering these settings can produce some effects. Try shooting a fast car on a slow shutter speed and perhaps you might enjoy the blurring of the image, particularly if a stationary figure is in the foreground to con­trast against it. Then you might want to play around with how a fast shutter speed - requiring more light - records in a low-light environment.

Focus

Focus rings (a ring around the lens that you turn to alter the focus manually) are rare on most cam­corders. Without any manual means to alter focus you will have to rely on using (or abusing) the auto­matic focus feature. Auto focus works by projecting an infrared beam at the nearest object in the middle of the frame and assessing from the speed of its return how far away it is