New to Documentary film making

T

Travism

New member
Hi all,

I will be doing palaeontological fieldwork in the High Arctic of Canada this summer. Since this work will take place on Inuit owned land, I feel it is important to give something back and to educate northern communities about the work we do and why it is important. I have some experience in amateur photography but no previous experience film-making. I hope to film and produce an educational documentary about palaeontologial fieldwork in Canada's High Arctic. When it is done I will ship it to schools throughout Canada's North.

At the moment, I have no filming equipment of my own but I am applying for funding to purchase some. I could potentially have up to $5000 Canadian to purchase the required equipment. I will also have access to a small JVC camcorder (just a consumer model).

I would like to get into documentary film making and I will have plenty of opportunity to shot video in unique locations in the future (i.e. Antarctica, Dinosaur National park (Alberta), and potentially in the Gobi desert in Mongolia).

My question is, how should I spend the money I will receive. I have been looking at the Panasonic HVX-200 but I am leaning toward the HPX-170 . I realize that this would take all of my budget but I feel it would be important to have a relatively small reliable camera that has the ability to shoot HD. I would be able to get some accessories with out of my pocket money (Tripod, Additional P2 card etc).

What do you guys think?




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Travism:

Congrats on your fieldwork this Summer in the Arctic. Must be nice to know you are going on an adventure in the next few months :)

Did you apply for funding through a gov't program or through your university? Be warned that gov't funding in Canada is normally very slow... hopefully you get it before you go. Sometimes funding can take up to a year to get due to all the paperwork you have to fill out.

Depending on how much you get, I'd actually lean towards a Canon T2i with a couple of reliable lenses and extra battery packs. I have an HVX200 but if you are out in the wild, you may want something more compact and portable than the HVX200 and something you can snap some cool pics with too. The T2i comes in at $899 Cdn. for the body, just look for a zoom lens and a nice macro lens as well on ebay or craigslist aftwards. Buy a good padded bag for it as well and get some reliable sticks (tripod) too. You'll have to get a couple of memory cards for the T2i as well and then something to put all your footage on afterwards. Do you have a laptop? If so, don't store the footage on there, it will fill up your hard drive quickly. Get a external hard drive (1TB - 2TB storage) you can dump the footage too. You'll need a compact flash card reader too to get the footage from your cards to the external HD. As far as audio goes, you may want to consider a Rode Stereomic or external audio recorder too for the T2i.

You can spend a lot of money very quickly with a documentary the first time. I went through this back in 2008 and I'm still spending money today adding things on. You don't need tons of things to do a documentary but you need essentials. Make a list (and ask lots of people on here or other sites) what you need and what you don't need.

Bottom line, just get something reliable which will allow you to capture things you want to capture. My HVX200 is great and I'm getting the T2i this week as a secondary camera. I've probably spend $14,000 in gear for my film but at least I can say all of it's been necessary and well spent.
 
Dale, those are some valuable suggestions based on the budget.

Travism, the only limitation with the Canon T2i is you can only record 12 minutes at a time and no XLR inputs. So as long as these limitations don't effect what you're recording - This equipment list would be a good idea. You would just have to invest in a Beachtek adapter for XLR inputs, if sound is crucial.
 
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