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

Pioneering film­makers such as Nick Broomfield, Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore, who mix polemic with fact and personal insight, have made documentary one of the most energetic and stimulating places for a filmmaker to work. Crucially, films such as Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore) and Touching the Void (Kevin MacDonald) have convinced the industry that big financial returns are possible on what used to be a no-go area for Hollywood.

Figure 3.2 Documentary filmmakers need resilience to work in extreme conditions far removed from the comfort of the studio. In this still, Franny Armstrong, director of Spanner Films, prepares for her film Drowned Out.

What these and other filmmakers have done is make documentary as creative and interesting as narra­tive film. It allows the chance to put together a narrative and employ the creativity you would like to use in narrative film, but without the limitations of conventional storytelling.

My kind of people?

Within the filmmaking community, documentary makers tend to opt for projects others would give a wide berth. If this was the world of sports, they would be doing the extreme end - hang-gliding while blindfolded above the sierras. Discomfort and obstacles are their bread and butter and they look for problems, war zones, trouble spots the way most of us avoid them. Documentary makers live rough, work alone and leave their critics at base camp while they go and chase the next story.

Non-narrative

This encompasses a whole range of work where other elements of the film are dominant rather than plot. Here, visual meaning is the dominant factor. If we talked about plots as happening in a linear way (this happened, followed by that and so on), then these movies are non-linear. You take in the whole experience and then try to figure out what it was all about.

Experimental/art gallery films

Even finding a label for this kind of film is hard - many films experiment in some way, and not all films seen in galleries are experimental, and in any case, can they be called films? It is probably the most intriguing area of film to look at and yet the hardest to find; it is almost impossible to find such pieces at your local store and many artists cannot afford to commit their work to DVD for commercial sale.

These kinds of works radically break outside of the normal viewing confines we are used to