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

Mapping the industry

State of the art: mapping the film industry

We've spent some time looking at the main issues affecting the new world of moving images. Next, we need to look at who pays the bills, the industry itself. What kind of health is the film industry in and what are the trends that stand to affect filmmakers?

An overview

A possible analogy for the film industry is that of an iceberg. Only a very small amount of the total is actually visible and yet it is that small part that is most visible and draws our attention. Mainstream feature films are still the backbone of the industry and there are no signs that audiences are about to desert their second favourite pastime (after gaming). In fact, the need for newer twists on tired genres and for more flexible means of watching movies is the result of larger appetites on the part of audi­ences rather than disillusionment. Hollywood's response, as we have seen, has been to draw in inter­national cultures to inject new life into its staple genre diet, and it is tentatively seeing the possibilities for interactivity in DVD.

Within this surface mass of the movie world, there are a range of smaller industries with different eco­nomic models - where expectations for profits are smaller but have corresponding budgets. In these models there are established audiences that coexist with the mainstream fare, often within the same company. So, a large studio can support left-field directors like David O. Russell (/ Heart Huckabees, 2004) or Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004) because a Harry Potter or other lucrative franchise covers losses. Furthermore, such movies - which are independent in spirit if not in pocket from the major studios - often return greater profits than many blockbusters in terms of the ratio of money spent on actual production (the negative cost) to money earned. Further afield, markets in territories such as Asia and Latin America are surprisingly buoyant, despite economic struggles, and are resilient to the flood of bigger budget films from Hollywood.

If we go slightly below the waterline of our iceberg, we see the hundreds of movies which don't make it into theatres - or don't surface. The iron grip of the distributor prevents them from getting to the

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upper levels of visibility and profitability. The distributor has, for a long time, been seen as preventing new directors from breaking through