Besides a camera, light is the most important tool you need to shoot good video Sometimes the light you need is already there and sometimes, more often, you’ll have to bring equipment in to create or modify your light. Regardless…
If you’ve ever found yourself on set loosing track of progress, wondering if you shot everything you came to shoot, or just altogether forgetting where you are, you need a shot list. Even with a shot list on hand, I…
As my weary team and I near the close of our independent film’s second year of production, I often think back on our purchasing decisions. Before we started filming we set budget caps for each ‘department,’ distributing our funds across…
Werner Herzog once said “If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!” but in the era of digital filmmaking it can be even easier… and less dangerous! I…
(2018 UPDATE: I originally wrote this in 2012, but I’ve heavily revised to eliminate less relevant information and provide even more solutions.) When it comes to filmmaking, like many artforms, it’s not easy being green. I can’t honestly tell you…
(2018 UPDATE: I wrote this in 2012, and since then I have heard of many positive experiences with the Transcend and other cheap brands. I’ve also been told that the market is flooded with counterfeit SanDisk cards, even on the…
This anecdote should illustrate a few matters of safety on a film set, as well as some budgetary implications arising from lack of preparation in the safety department. When you need a solid scene of somebody’s arm getting hacked with…
In film class, we were taunted challenged with tales of the unaffordable Steadycam: a magical device that would allow a cinematographer to move freely around with a camera attached most unattractively to his/her midsection (despite the typical advertising efforts, these are…
The scene to be shot last Saturday required a fresh grave and since we didn’t much feel like tilling up the soil in a graveyard, we determined that we’d better get our hands dirty, and get our hands on some…
