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

Narrative film may be the established dominant mode, but entering this area doesn't mean you have to follow film trends, making cliche-ridden films that only emulate other directors. Certainly this may be true within the profit-driven industry of Hollywood, but there are numerous directors who follow their own path by turning narrative into something that is their own.

The short movie

In the last chapter we heard about how short movies (average 10 minutes in length or less) have had something of a comeback as the new filmmaker's school. Almost all filmmakers have made several before going on to make successful features, the shorts serving as a place to try out ideas, road-test stories, and develop style and exercise conventions. The quick pace of short movie production also helps build confidence, as you can make one with very few resources or little time.

The micro-short

This development of the narrative movie is relatively new, resulting from the need for shorter-than-short movies that download fast over the Internet or to phones. The particular constraints of movies lasting less than a minute are invigorating, helping you to develop faster as a filmmaker. Straight narrative sits as eas­ily as abstract movies in this form, although many narrative versions tend to be more successful because of the startling way they compress conventional storytelling into small spaces - temporally and spatially.

Films and how they work 45

My kind of people?

The narrative filmmaker obsesses about films to the degree that relationships end (and start) over top ten lists of movies. For their own work, they ride a wave of adrenaline, enjoy stress ('I actually feel stressed now if I am not stressed, without anything to do.' James Sharpe, filmmaker) and stop at noth­ing to get a film made. Theirs is a guerrilla world where night-time raids are made to scale the walls of mainstream cinema, funded by credit card. Organized and skilled, they survive on little sleep but are sustained through their strong - and deserved - sense of their own talent.

Documentary

Documentary has a long and honourable tradition of seeking the truth and dragging it out from under a rock, so it has been an exciting and provocative place for a filmmaker to work. But as the ways of big business and government have become more wily and shrewd, engaging spin and marketing to protect interests, so filmmakers have started to employ new means of cutting through them