Digital Moviemaking 40: Plan It and Do It!

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

As the weather improves and the end of the school year rapidly approaches, it’s once again time to begin planning movie productions for over the summer. I haven’t had a column on digital moviemaking since last summer, so now is as good a time as any to kick-start ideas for summer movie projects.

For one thing, this August is the deadline to submit proposals for the “Cold War Film Contest,” which will give moviemakers the chance to shoot in a perfectly preserved nuclear missile launch control center near Cooperstown, N.D. It may be worthwhile touring the site first to inspire ideas, and the admission fee can be deducted from the contest entry fee. More details are at http://www.coldwarfilmcontest.com.

For another thing, award-winning North Dakota playwright/screenwriter Kathy Coudle King and I are finalizing details for our fifth annual “Summer Moviecamps” on the campus of UND. These are brief but comprehensive two-week workshops in June where participants will write, shoot, and edit a movie with the others in the group. A session running evenings (6-8 and 6-9 pm) from June 1st-11th is for adults age 18 and up, and a session held afternoons (3-5 and 1-5 pm) from June 14th-24th is for young people age 12-18.

The theme for this year’s youth workshop is “monster movies,” and for the first time the class will have access to a greenscreen to aid in special effects. The adult workshop has no advance story topic, but will focus on organizing ideas into a coherent narrative script and then the production and postproduction processes required to make it into a finished movie.

The movies produced during both workshops will all be screened at the historic Empire Theatre in downtown Grand Forks the afternoon of Saturday, June 26th and all participants will receive a DVD of all workshop projects. The registration fee is $195 for either of the two-week workshops, with a $25 discount if enrolled before May 1st. Although they’re put on through UND’s Department of Continuing Education, they are not for academic credit so there’s no pressure about grades.

I’ve put some basic details on the workshops on my website at http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/cjacobs/SummerMovieCamp.htm and registration may be done online by going directly to http://conted.und.edu/secure/summercamp/ for those who wish to pay by credit card or e-check.
Making movie used to be something that required a huge financial investment in specialized equipment and hiring skilled technicians to use it. Even low-budget features and many short films could cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. Equipment usually had to be rented because it was too expensive for individuals to buy unless they were planning to invest in a filmmaking career.
Now home video cameras of varying quality cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Any home computer can now be used to edit video, and those also range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each, depending upon speed and quality. The biggest investment now is time rather than money.

Although the high-definition video revolution is gradually making progress, there is still no easy and affordable software for authoring and making BluRay discs of home-made HDTV content. Thus it’s still more reliable, easier, and more cost-effective to continue using standard-definition home video for the present.

However, over the past couple of years the traditional tape-based camcorders have all but disappeared from consumer video products. Most cameras now record directly to internal hard drives or solid-state memory cards instead of miniDV, Digital 8, Hi-8, or old-fashioned VHS tapes. This makes it even easier to transfer footage to a computer by merely plugging in a cable and dragging the files to the computer’s hard drive, rather than “capturing” footage in real time.

Unfortunately this convenience comes with a danger and additional expense. Hard drives and memory cards are intended to be re-used in the camera after the footage is on the computer, which means if the computer’s hard drive ever crashes or develops corrupted files, all those scenes are lost forever. A tape can always be recaptured. People who use tapeless camcorders should always have a spare hard drive to back up all video footage (and drives now can cost as low as $100 per Terabyte, about a tenth of prices just five years ago).

Of course it’s not just technology that makes a movie. It takes people with belief in a project and the persistence to get it done. To get that dedication, it takes characters they can identify with in a story they want to see come to life, a story with a coherent beginning, middle, and end. That’s one reason the UND summer moviemaking workshops devote the first week to writing the movie before getting into production techniques.

To make that story interesting, it takes more than simply setting up the camera to record the performances. That’s how movies were made back in 1895! Every scene ought to be shot from three to five or more different camera angles and distances. Only in that way can a moviemaker use editing to decide exactly what the audience should see at what time and for how long, to give the greatest impact to each scene and influence how the audience responds to each character and event.

So put that idea you’ve had in the back of your mind down on paper to get it organized, round up friends and family to help, and buy or borrow a camera and computer. Then shoot each scene several times from a variety of angles, put the footage onto your computer, and assemble it in the order you want. Make a DVD to share your movie at its full quality, or compress it to a smaller size so you can upload it to the web.

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