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

The fast output of commercials and the need to say as much as possible in the shortest space of time means that the prac­titioner has to master the whole panoply of non-verbal signs and symbols - both from the world of film language and from that of universal symbols. All of this helps with your more conventional movies by allowing you to practise saying what you want to say in the shortest time and in the most economical way. As a form to practise with, the commercial asks you to work within a narrow brief, but it is this very constraint that often encourages creativity and the development of new solutions. New ways of sending video mean that ad directors are being recruited for phone viral movies (brief movies sent from friend to friend via phone or email) and short web ads too.

My kind of people?

Ad directors can be hard-nosed about what they do - constant and occasionally dispiriting pitching for jobs leaves its scars, but it is this thrill of the chase that drives them. Many have features in development and see ads as being dirty and fast, but they pay well. However, most directors of ads will only find that they have control over their careers just at the point when they leave it behind to start on the big feature. Not for the faint-hearted.

Polymedia

These are stylish, unusual pieces of work, often displaying new ways of combining animation, live action, text or still images, and pushing the creative possibilities of the medium to the limit. Meaning and content are less important than the visually arresting or innovative image, though these films tend to be in turns political, philosophical and entertaining. Practitioners make films that cross over into just about every form of the moving image, hence the 'poly-' prefix. They are like bees pollinating each form by taking elements of one into another and creating new works. This sort of work is at the front of the DV revolution, often mixing with scientists (Blast Theory), artists (The Light Surgeons), architects (Lynn Fox) and designers (Pliex). If you want to make fast progress while investigating the artistic potential of the medium and try an area that has no discernible rules yet, then this is for you.

Go to: Chapter 10:2 for more details on polymedia work.

My kind of people?

Increasingly, this sort of filmmaker works in animation, seeing the whole industry as part of an emer­ging 'motion graphics' field