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

Confused movies are ones where no thought has been given to what they actually mean, while resonant movies are the ones where there is very clear meaning. But this has nothing to do with what kind of meaning you opt for. Successful films don't have to shout out an important message nor do they have to make the audience think something - they are not propaganda. In fact, many films today prefer to avoid sermons in favour of raising questions and ideas for us to take home and reflect on. Films such as Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2005), Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002) and In The Cut (Jane Campion, 2003) tend to nudge us towards outcomes rather than hand them to us on a plate.

We could refer to any emergence of the core themes and ideas of a film as signs. The devices that deliver these signs exist in layers surrounding the film. Some are easy to spot, others need a little work to uncover. Like forensic work at a crime scene, some signs are for rookies (the gun on the floor, the pool of blood) and others are for those who know how to look (the mismatched fingerprints on the trig­ger, the photos smashed on the mantelpiece). Like detectives, we try to uncover what happened and we look for a motive too - why it happened. Then we see how this makes us feel, what it tells us about people, life and the world today.

This hierarchy of signs is placed by the director so that we can experience the movie on different levels -it can be entertainment or it can be philosophy, depending on your choice. Sometimes, the philosophy side gets to be bigger than intended - for instance, in Hitchcock's films, where we get to know as much about the psyche of the director as we do the plot. Elsewhere, a film can become more meaningful through its relation to the Zeitgeist - for instance, with Terminator I and II, where we can track the changes in masculinity in society as Arnie is all Rambo-style machismo in the first movie but by the end of the decade is able to look after children and even weep with emotion. It's easy to see why Kindergarten Cop was such an obvious next step. So, when watching a film, we need to look for signs at varying levels and look for others that may be attached later to the film.

Plot/story

Starting at the uppermost layer, we have the most visible elements of a film - the surface. This is like the shell of the film, containing the events that happen to make up the narrative