How I did it: Honestly, I just got a few friends together, wrote a concept, grabbed a camcorder, and started shooting.  It's more important to produce volume, practice, and improve on your own than it is to sit around wishing you knew how.

Sometimes a lack of training forces innovation (look at Evil Dead or El Mariachi), and I produced things as a 14 year old with no knowledge of f/stops or film stocks that still amaze me now.

Lessons & tips:

• Film combines dozens of different disciplines, and you need to study them all.  Read everything you can get your hands on about composition, lighting, story, art direction, acting, whatever.  The more you understand how these things operate and combine to create a film, the more natural the process will be and the better you will work as part of a team.
• You don't need film school.  Everything you need to know about making movies you can learn with nothing but a public library, the internet, and your own DVD collection.
• Volunteer to be a crew member on every project you ever get wind of, help your friends out, ask anyone and everyone you know if they want to contribute something, and it will happen.  Everyone loves movies, and most interesting people can do some form of art, and film combines them all (writing, acting, painting, music, photography, you name it).  You'd be surprised how many people want to help.
• Buy/rent a camera with as many manual controls as possible, and use it on full manual at all times.  The sooner you learn how to expose, colour time, and focus properly, the sooner people will be amazed by your work.
• Look at films that amaze you, and break down a scene.  Find out where the camera is at all times, when it pans, when it pushes, when it cuts, what it focuses on.  HOW is the story told?  WHY is it it told this way?  What would you have done?  This will help you reverse engineer film as a whole and understand how it all goes together.  You should only need to read about the technical aspects of film, not the artistic aspects, if you pay attention when you watch, and if you know what artistic elements you are trying to create, it's dead easy to look up how to make it work technically.
• The most important element of making an interesting image is the Rule of Thirds.
• The second most important element is contrast.  Unless you have a reason not too, turn your gain off and try to get a deep, dark black, and a clean, pure white with a fairly well-distributed mid range.  If you don't have enough contrast, add more light or narrow the light you have.  Practice in black and white, and when you apply your skills to colour, you'll be amazed how much better it looks (assuming your white balance is correct).
• When you're starting out, it's better to film a mediocre story than film nothing, but eventually you will want to learn to tell a GOOD story.  This is very difficult, but very worth doing.  Take some writing classes, read screenplays, practice writing in your spare time, check out the first book in the resources section.  If you don't like this part, find someone who does and ask them to write something for you.  There's no shame in that, and it's better than being lazy and continuing to work on something you're not passionate about saying.

Resources: Story by Robert McKee
Film Directing: Cinematic Motion by Steven Katz
http://www.theasc.com/

Nov 27, 2008, 01:20AM PST | 0 comments