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

How films work

The shortcut to making a film that lasts in people's minds lies in understanding the nuts and bolts of movies - not just the technical side but the mechanics of how you make viewers see and feel what you want. The tools you have learnt and the conventions and rules you have picked up now need to come together to add up to more than just technology and skills. In a sense, learning about continuity, light­ing or composition is like learning about the anatomy of filmmaking. This section takes us into what we could call the soul of filmmaking - the meanings that lie within. Understanding how this inner life works means that you stand to make your next movie an experience viewers won't forget.

The tools

The basic building blocks in a film are:

• Image - what we see

• Sound - what we hear

• Space - what we think we see (perception)

• Time - when we think it happened.

Everything else in the movie is subservient to these basic elements. Story, plot and character are vis­ible elements in the film, but are simply the result of the way the above are manipulated. If we look at how each of these elements are represented in your skills, we could identify them as:

• Image - camera framing, lighting, movement, colour

• Sound - diagetic sound (within the scene), non-diagetic sound (subjective, off camera), music

• Space - depth, focus, composition and sound

• Time - editing.

In different ways, each of the tools above are a way of expressing meaning in your film. Story and char­acter are much less able to express meaning than they appear. An interesting way of throwing light on this is by looking at remakes, two films with identical stories but which have very different meanings through use of the camera, colour, symbolism and so on. The original Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) set up a moral narrative of how a decent family are targeted by a released convict, yet in Scorsese's 1991 remake, certain changes are made that radically alter the meaning. The convict is given a semi-religious motivation, while the family are deceitful and self-destructive. The first movie places the sinner as the convict, while the second places the family - and crucially, the lawyer at the head of it - as the sinner while the convict is the sinned against.

So what exactly carries out the meaning side of the film? The answer is in the fact that every element carries it - it is not separate from the film but is integral to every part of it