How should I start!?

[florin]

see you on Monday!
tomorrow I'm going to climb the Great Smokey Mountains

[Matt5791]

If you want to make a film, the first thing to do is to and find a working super8 camera for about ?20 and a projector for about the same. Then go and buy the cheapest filmstock you can get hold of, like Kodachrome 40 - www.pro8mm.com -and go and learn about how to expose film. You will then be in a position to make a short silent sequence as a first film making experience.

But why not just use a video camera? there are many reasons why not to use a video camera. Obviously if you do your film will look like a home movie (which you may, of course, want), but probably the most important reason to use film is that you have so much control over the LOOK of the end result. There are so many looks available to the 'director of photography' dependant upon many many factors.

<font color="#a62a2a"><font size="1">[ November 03, 2003 01:21 PM: Message edited by: Matt5791 ]</font></font>

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ November 03, 2003 01:21 PM: Message edited by: Matt5791 ]</font>

[miker]

does anyone remember when Super8 was the original home movie format?!

[belovedmonster]

telling people to go to buy film is stupid advice... so what if video looks more like a home movie than a hollywood movie? the main piont is he would be learning the act of film making from all pionts of view... story telling, acting, composition, blocking... etc etc... and he would be doing it for the price of a DV tape...

by the time he has made a few **** movies on film that no one would wanna watch anyways he is going to of spent a fortune.

Film has its place... and that place IMO is once you know the basics and will get the most out of the medium.

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ November 05, 2003 09:32 AM: Message edited by: belovedmonster ]</font>

[miker]

yes, video is very inexpensive. with a cheap capture card and some half decent software you can accomplish many things at no cost on a home PC.

[belovedmonster]

what did you do to those images?

[Yammeryammeryammer]

Looks like colour correction.

[miker]

not so much colour correction as colour by artistic license.

to play with film in the same way would be far more costly.

of course, what still holds true with film is the actual dynamic of the colour range and contrast range.

video is no doubt a compromise, but so is super8. as has been mentioned elswhere though, if you know you want to direct, why does the format have a bearing on how good your yarn will be? at my level I'll be lucky to get a DVD distribution deal, so why bother with film just yet?

even Kodak have seen the writing on the wall and have a digital services division (which I forget the name of)

trivia: Willow has the first CGI morph effect (ie not dissolves) and Terminator2 was ILM's first project to use all digital compositing.