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

So far so good. But if you want to stop the camera from doing this constantly you will have to let it find one particular set­ting and stay there. For example, if you meet a few friends and decide to put them in this film, you can shoot straight at them by putting them in the middle of the frame, which is going to look dull, or you can get a more interesting shot. Home movies and tourist movies put people in the middle, but film­makers want more in their shots and so may move these people slightly to the side so that we see a few other elements of the scene. So, set up your friends so that the arrangement looks less predictable; then set the focus automatically; then turn it off and see what happens.

The result is that your friends are going to be in focus most of the time. If they move a great deal within the frame that's fine, as long as they move across the frame rather than close to or further away from you. But if you had left the auto focus switched on continually your friends would be switching in and out of focus every time they vacated the very middle of the screen. So, in this case, you use auto to get what you want, then get rid of it. Now you are in control of the camera.

Evaluation

This project is unusual compared to the others in this book in that it relies very much on improvisation and on making mistakes. At each step of the way, you are wresting control from the automatic settings of the camera and seeing what happens when you shoot against the way it suggests. After all, the settings it gives are simply designed to give you what is considered to be the closest representation of reality. But in most filming you are trying to create illusions, to improve reality in some way, and so it becomes crucial to defeat these realist tendencies in the camera. You know where they are if you need them.

32 Practical DV Filmmaking

I want something more challenging

To stretch your skills further, try combining two or more manual controls - for instance, combine the iris with shutter speed, or focus with aperture. These combinations enable you to create new effects, such as the way increasing the shutter speed reduces light entering the lens in much the same way as aperture.

The theme in this movie is designed to offer an easy route, but you could try combining this with another project so that you make a film from elsewhere in the book but solely using manual controls.