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

Films and how they work

Types of film and filmmakers

The aim of this section is to start thinking about what sort of filmmaker you want to become. Do you want to make films with straight stories, or are non-narrative films going to inspire you more? Does the music video allow you to be more imaginative than, say, a drama? Or do you ultimately want to make feature films?

Part of your task is to move as quickly as you can towards a position where you know what is out there and how you can break into it. Take your pick.

Narrative film

A narrative movie uses a story as its main motivation. Since the birth of cinema, narrative has been the driving force of the film industry, to the extent that other forms are described by how much or how little they address narrative. It evolved largely from the dominance of literary media in culture and borrows hugely from literature in the way stories are told, even down to the use of cutaways in editing. But as a primarily visual medium, film has other possibilities and many filmmakers have tempered the dominance of plot and increased the use of visual signs and symbols to develop the themes and mean­ings of a film, such as Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Within narrative film there have arisen many conventions about how you tell a story. Largely due to the need to agree a common code with the viewing public which can be applied to each and every film, there are certain ways of shooting and editing that will disguise the actual process of filmmaking and draw attention only to the plot and the characters within it. Thus, film becomes a true escapist experience.

If you work with stories today, however, you need to possess some detailed knowledge of these con­ventions as if they are a set of signs that an increasingly knowing audience is going to decipher. This means that you can subvert conventions and can mix signs from different forms (for instance, by

Figure 3.1 Directing involves a range of skills from the technical to the artistic. Here, director David Casals sets up a shot for his short, Time Cocktail.

including parts of other genres, as in Tarantino's Kill Bill), but all the time you have to be aware of where you stand within the wider framework of narrative film. Audiences develop their awareness of these signs in narrative film simply by seeing lots of films, so as a filmmaker you are equally able to read the signs and then perhaps make up your own.