Highschool Students First Film

I bought an XL-2 when I was in school, which they were using for a lot of the experimental work, because I'm too lazy to want to screw around with a school's equipment and their awful rental system, which was lackluster and disorganized and they often were completely out of essential equipment we needed to finish projects. So I bought everything I needed, XL-2, shotgun boom mic that was better than the one they were using, and a much better lighting kit than the lousy beat-up Lowell kit they would give us (150 and 300 watt lights? What the hell is that? You can't light a miniature with that, lol).

I wouldn't recommend any standard definition camera. I'm always confused by people saying, "Are you planning on going to Blu-ray? Well, if not, you don't need HD!" Uhh, there's a SERIOUS problem if you're outputting in the same resolution that you shot at. Acquiring footage should always be superior to the presentation format. This gives you room to play with in post, for one, but two it just looks better. Take something shot on the XL-2 and put it on DVD and it's worse looking than something shot on the HVX200, because one was shot HD one wasn't, doesn't matter that the delivery is SD. It's the difference between a AAA baseball player (SD) and an MLB baseball player both playing in AAA (HD), obviously the MLB player is going to dominate even though he's not in his native territory, he's at a lower class. It's really not hard to understand.

To buy an SD camera now is a joke. I know how gung-ho people are about their DVXs, but it's not 1997 anymore, honestly. It's time to move on. That camera and the XL-2 are not even close to pro cameras. If you're an amazing filmmaker and you have the greatest DP around you can definitely get some half-way decent footage out of them, but they're not acceptable professional tools. Standard definition is unbelievably bad. Even 720p is kinda iffy. I mean ideally 1080p or better is what you should film at. You know this when you open up the files on your computer and they don't even take up the entire screen of a 20" monitor on a computer.

I wonder if 5 years from now people will still wax poetic about their DVXs and have this weird sentimental attachment to a completely inferior camera.
 
Not only are pretty pictures not all about resolution, good films are not all about pretty pictures.
 
Maybe not, but it matters a lot to most audiences. Maybe not us more sophisticated film viewers who don't care if movies are subtitled, black and white, old, new, etc., just so long as they are well done in a story and acting sense, compelling, etc. But I have way too many friends who won't watch black and white movies, don't watch movies that are subtitled, won't watch anything that didn't play in 3,000+ theaters, etc. That makes it pretty tough for us little guys to make work they will even consider, and a sub-par image isn't going to help much with that.

Then again, it wouldn't be any issue if most films shot with a DVX, for instance, were even half-way decent movies. But they aren't. Probably 95 out of 100 completely suck hardcore. 1 of the other 5 is good to great. Maybe 2-3 are pretty good. But it has nothing to do with the DVX at all, haha, it has everything to do with the fact that if you cannot afford to shoot with a real camera, a professional grade camera for a feature (even HVX200 is questionable, IMO, for feature shooting, but that's me... not saying you can't do it), then you can't afford way too many other things, too, like real actors, a professional crew, the right locations, etc. If you took any great filmmakers and gave him a decent budget, even $2-3 million, and a DVX100, they could make a very good film and nobody would probably care it was shot with the DVX. But that's the problem, nobody would really do that, because there are such better cameras out there. So basically even though it's not directly correlated, because DVX doesn't equal bad movie, there is such a strong correlation because shooting with a DVX for a feature means you have no money, and having no money means you almost always have a terrible movie no matter what the plot and story is. You just can't pull off a great story with great characters with no money unless you're an absolute genius, and how many of those are there? I doubt a lot of today's working directors, guys who make big budget features even, could make any sort of good film with tiny little budgets either. They are good at working with large crews and large budgets.

The guy I know who could do that is Robert Rodriguez, and he's obviously shown he can do it. But everyone thinks they're him. That guy is amazing, most of us aren't going to be him even if we think we are, haha.
 
Jon makes a really good point. We all know its not the camera its the story. But it IS the camera. People want to see a pretty picture. People are HD crazy. If it looks shitty, its going to take a lot of convincing for people to be able to follow the story and see all the elements of the film. They might even turn it off right away if its that bad of quality. The general public at least.
 
I don't think people would turn off DVX footage because it has "terrible resolution".
 
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probably not, but people use worse cameras than that. and if i can film in HD, burn to blue-ray, and watch it on my blue ray player, or HD on vimeo, why wouldn't i?
 
Then shoot HD?

While your at it - might as well buy a RED. Best resolution to date. Or IMAX. IMAX is where it's at.
 
Yeah, RED is a great camera. If I were to shoot a feature I wouldn't use less than the RED, but that's just me.

As for DVX not being terrible resolution, really? It isn't? SD is terrible resolution. Any time you are filming SD stuff, wow, I mean come on do you realize at "full quality" that won't even fill up a half-way decent segment of my monitor? That's pretty terrible unless you're delivering to YouTube. Then it's fine. And yeah you CAN make DVX footage look very good, I don't think anyone doubts that, I've seen some good stuff filmed on the XL-2, but honestly a lot of people have no idea how to do that. There's no room for error with DVX footage either, you can't push in on a shot to 90% and lose quality because of a boom mic in shot, or because you have to rotate the image, etc.

Full Frontal was shot with the XL-2, looks horrible, and that was a professional film. If I was watching it at home I would have turned it off after 10 minutes, the footage was just awful. Besides that it was a terrible movie, by a gifted director, too, but nonetheless a really bad film.
 
I guess we have different standards then. It looks fine on DVD when it's a pro shoot, doesn't look fantastic usually but looks fine. But that was also acquired in much higher resolution, which makes a huge difference. Not to mention the dynamic range of the cameras they used to acquire was excellent, compared to acquiring on SD, which results in pretty amateurish footage most of the time. As I said you can make it look pretty respectable but meh... not easy and usually that's the exception.

I mean it's basically what 640 x 480? I had a computer monitor like that once. Twelve years ago!

Even 720p it's like, well, looks great online, looks good on most TVs I think if you filmed right, but it's... not the best either. Once you get into 1080p range it's great.
 
RED is sick. I Just don't have 25000 dollars laying around right now. Maybe when scarlet comes out.

Ill post my short film in the user films section when its done
 
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Eh, no ones around buffalo really. I feel like theres not much around here for Filmmakers. When i was looking for cameras and gear, i only found one local place to rent, and the places that sell are pretty much best buy and circuit city, not really specializing in cameras at all.

Kinda leaves me with limited options
 
haha, yeah I can imagine. It doesn't exactly seem like the happening place for that. A lot of communities are like that, tough to find filmmakers, crew, etc. Los Angeles is obviously the mecca for that, but the problem is it creates ridiculous competition. I just came across an actor yesterday who has his own grip trucks and he gives special discounts if you cast him in a significant part in your film. That's certainly creative, haha. He was in Corrado, by the way. Seems like a good business idea, I just think it's funny because it's kind of a nod to how tough it is to make it just from acting.
 
Rentals for Buffalo are typically down in NYC. There are many places to rent there. Most productions that I work on in upstate NY have rentals from Canada when they come down here, or from the City.
 
Hi Jamie,

I totally understand the situation you're in right now. That's because I'm also a senior in high school and 3-4 years ago I became obsessed with filmmaking. I have now decided it's definitely what I want to do later on. I saw every single school project as an opportunity to practice my skills. It also meant an automatic A+. :)

I'd say to only increase the time of your films when you're doing AMAZING short films. If not what's the point. I think every director has a number of horrible films in them. You're better off making the first ones really short. If you're not making AMAZING short films yet then keep trying. Each time analyzing what went wrong and how you could make things better. Another thing is watch ALOT of movies. Write reviews. Talk about them. Perfecting one's art is a personal thing so everyone's approach is different. Learn to write scripts, plan your movies, shoot them and finish them.

About the equipment, as someone mentioned don't buy anything if you're going to an university that gives you rented equipment. If you need to shoot something to get into university here's what you do. Go to Best Buy and buy an HV20 and some tapes. Before doing this have your 5-10 minute story worked out, written and planned. Shoot the movie with the HV20 import it into the computer and return it to the store. Say you changed your mind. If you're shooting 24P which you should, you'll need a trial version of cineform to remove the pulldown on the HV20. Google it to get more info.

I hope this helps.
 
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