Diary

[philipswales]

The STF Website now has a new film-maker's diary, which will progress the development of our new feature, "10 Colwyn Road".

It will be updated regularly, so remember to check in once in a while.

Spare Time Films website

[Kev Owens]

Wow.

A while back the site was a typed notice from Philip stating his woes as a film-maker and his intentions to quit for a long while. [img]graemlins/rain.gif[/img]

[img]graemlins/sun.gif[/img] Things have certainly perked up, a feature in the pipeline- any ideas on budget/format/timescale yet?

[philipswales]

Budget = chump change, bar the camera (see below)

Format = DV

Timescale = over the summer


That's if we can buy or blag a decent 3 CCD camera first.

I've been looking at the Canon XL1S today.

Kev, you know anything about it, or have any other camera-related advice?

[Kev Owens]

As it happens, I've directed a short in which we used the Canon XL1 (the XL1S is an up-dated model, with some small extra features).

Most people you speak to praise it, and to be honest I'm one of them. A great camera all-round. Hard-wearing, versatile, but most important the results (in terms of Mini-DV) are fantastic, much better than the Sony equivalent.

The stuff we produced with it was mistaken for digi-beta many times. I'd recommend however that you make sure that you have someone on-board who knows the camera and knows how to light for the camera to get the best results (expecially since for a horror film where perhaps the lighting is even more vital than usual.) For a DV cam there's a hell of a lot of freedom in terms of manual settings and only a fool would let them go to waste. If this isn't possible, then try to ensure you have time to train yourself before shooting and do a shit-load of test shots and review all of them on a big screen. At a real push, a monitor during shooting helps a lot (in all situations of course).