Rick Dawes

Actually, I am very gratefull for your candor, Mr. Boddington. And I agree that with no recognizable actors or other big names, chances are slim. Especially working with DV. And that is actually my point really. Because professionals rarely present their work on DV, it is seen as the format of bad amateur movies, and granted, most are bad. However, for those of us who don't yet have the backing to do film, DV gives us a format that we can afford to work with. DV also provides us the opportunity to add production value on a level we could never hope for in film. We can do colour correction, virtual sets, space battles, and ADR. Eventually, the goal with time and practice is to make something good enough to slip through the cracks and be seen by people such as yourself at a film festival, perhaps, and then maybe to Blockbuster:) . The other hope is that by shooting a complete project, you show that you can actually finish something and have it be worth watching. Then perhaps, someone will be willing to invest enough to get name actors and shoot in 35mm.

I've never seen anything decent looking on DV. After Blair Witch Project, all you heard was "It doesn't matter what format you shoot on!", and "it's a whole new era in filmmaking now, the big guys are shaking in their boots" blah blah blah. You don't hear that crap anymore, do you? It's because now, just as then, most video movies suck harder than most film movies. It's extremely rare when something shot on DV is worth watching. And the distributors know that more than anyone, because they're the ones having to wade through this tsunami of excrement that is "the DV revolution". MP Hi Folks. A newbie here. A friend of mine has decided to make his first movie and has tagged me to be his cinematographer and like so many of those other indie filmmakers we will be using a "digital" video camera. When finished we, like so many others, do hope to have our movie picked up for distribution. Our reason for going digital is of course cost but, also control. By having all of the gear at home we are not as rushed as we might be if in a film editing suite paying a couple of hundred dollars per hour to edit. Or, as worried about doing another take if we were paying for film. Therefore we have the time to do things right. Now having said that, I must say that agree with the above statement, that most of what the amateur/indie crowd is putting out is total crap. I'm forty seven years old and have had a love affair with movies all my life. I remember seeing Mary Poppins in the theatre as a child as well as Planet of the Apes and Patton. I think that what is wrong with shooting on DV, HD, or whatever has nothing to do with format but rather training and talent and a simple willingness to learn. I have watched friends of mine work on their own projects taking no time to learn how to work with the camera other than hitting record and recording very yellow, blue, or green images becausee they didn't know enough to white balance the camera. I think that if you were to take any one of you and put you in charge of a no budget indie project it would come out looking completely professional no matter what you were recording with. And, I think that is why distributors may over look DV projects. DV is cheap enough that you can pay for it yourself where as working in 35mm is expensive enough that you probably had to convince an investor that you and your crew are good enough to make that money back and so you likely hired the best crew you could afford, i.e. professonals. Open Water was one of the inspirations for our writer/director to make this movie. He thought that if something so badly written and acted could make it, he could too. Having grown up watching (and paying attention to) the work of professionals I saw nothing but problems and mistakes from the first edit on and couldn't watch past the first twenty minutes. My resolve as the cinematographer for this project is not to impress anyone but, to simply not suck! I am taking the time to learn from all of you and practice and read. That makes no guarantees of course, but helps. If more amatuers would read "The Five C's of Cinematography" maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't all suck so badly. Rick.

As a person new to this site and new to cinematography/videography, I find this discussion interesting. Some friends and I are in the preproduction stage of making our first movie. After a discussion one night our director decided I would be his DP and after purchasing a Canon XHA1 handed it to me to learn. Now before finding this site and this particular topic, I always considered myself the production cinematographer because we weren't shooting an event or news footage but rather a narrative story form. It never mattered to me what we were shooting with but instead, what we were shooting. I have alot to learn of course but, it seems to me that anytime you are primarily shooting for a "cinematic" effect you are acting as a cinematographer where as if you mainly attempting to document an event you are something else, whether that be DP, documentary cameraman(person), or whatever else might be more appropriate. So speaks the truly uniformed.