COMMENTARY--Sometimes you have to go searching for opportunities
for personal development, and other times it lands on
you like an elephant dropped from a B-52 bomber. I
actively searched for opportunities to work overseas
simply because I wanted the experience of living and
working in a foreign culture. Bouncing between
countries like a spastic two year old might not be
everyone's cup of tea, but it has been an amazing
experience full of interesting events I'll remember
forever. On the other hand, I never expected to end
up "director of photography" on a low-budget,
feature-length film.
When I responded to a flyer posted around town, I expected at most to be an extra. Instead, I ended up spending two weeks worth of 18-24 hour days behind a pair of digital cameras. At the end of those two weeks, besides having piles of dirty clothes that would put the Augean stalls to shame, I came to understand the revolution that digital technology represents for the film industry. Digital media will democratize filmmaking, a process that will lead to more films that don't rely on funding from major studios.
The cameras
For our film, we chose to use a pair of Canon
XL-1 DV cameras (to be precise, one XL-1 and one
XL-1S, which is the newer of the two cameras). These
are the same cameras used by Danny Boyle for his
recent film, "28 Days Later."
DV is a digital video standard that is common in lower-end consumer camcorders. DV cameras are TV-oriented, which means you have to choose between a camera that produces video in the NTSC format (the standard used in the United States and Japan) and PAL (our choice, since it's the format used in Europe, but also because PAL is closer to the movie frame rate and offers marginally better resolution than NTSC). This also means that you have to chop off a bit of the top and bottom of the screen in order to fit the image into movie format. The XL-1S has optional 16:9 guidelines that makes it easy to tell where the cutoff should be, while the older XL-1 doesn't.
The Canon XL-1 is a 3 CCD camera. A CCD, or a "Charge Coupled Device," is the part of the camera that translates light into digital signals. Most cameras have only one CCD, as is the case with my Sony TRV-30 camcorder. The advantage of having 3 CCDs is that each CCD only has to deal with one color, Red, Green or Blue, which gives rise to greater clarity and richer colors.
One of the cool things about the Canon XL-1 is its cost, at least relative to traditional film cameras. The Canon XL-1S lists for about $4,700, though Amazon currently offers it at $3,598.94. We paid about $90 per camera per day to rent them. This is cheap compared to the next step up in digital media, the Sony Digibeta camera, which would have cost us about $180 / day to rent, and inconceivably expensive to buy.
Cost savings extend down to storage format. The Canon XL-1 stores its data on MiniDV cassette tapes, the same format used in consumer-grade digital camcorders. Mini DV tapes cost between $4 and $6, depending on tape quality. By contrast, Digibeta records to Betamax cassette tapes, which cost between $40-$50 per tape. This low cost left us free to film as much as we wanted, which partly explains the 17 hours of video we ended up with.
An important difference between the Canon XL-1 and lower-end digital recording devices is the degree of manual control you have over the recorded data. Most camcorders are of the point and shoot variety. These cameras automatically adjust to prevailing light conditions, which can cause problems as you pan the camera during a shot. This should be apparent to anyone who has used a consumer-grade video camera in outdoor shots and ended up with crisply defined clouds behind a pair of darkened silhouettes.
In contrast, the Canon XL-1 has a manual setting that allows you to control things like aperture (aka F-Stop), shutter speed, and "white balance" (basically, this ensures that your images don't come out blue or orange shifted). It has a whole bunch of other settings that make the camera look like the dashboard of a transatlantic jet, but for the most part, you can ignore them if you want to a) convert your digital movie to film which can be shown on traditional projection equipment (which we do), and b) if you are doing everything using manual settings, which we did.
The Process
Along with the cameras, we rented lighting equipment,
sound gear and a field monitor. Good lighting is
critical, particularly so for digital video with its
lower resolution vis à
vis traditional film. Our lighting setup included a
large, 1.2KW light (in industry parlance, a "blonde"),
two 650W lights (a "redhead"), a "bounce board" (which
is used to bounce light into or away from a scene), a
Chinese lantern with a 100 Watt bulb for soft lighting
in close-up scenes, and a collection of gels
(basically, a collection of colored pieces of plastic
which fit over the lamps and alter the scene in subtle
ways).
Sound equipment included a four-channel audio mixer, a set of clip-on microphones, and a boom microphone. Sound inevitably tends to be the hardest to get right, and we had several scenes we had to re-shoot because the sound was acting up.
One of the most useful pieces of equipment we rented was the field monitor. By plugging the field monitor into the back of one of our cameras, the directors could see exactly what the camera was seeing, and adjust the shot accordingly. This may seem of mild importance, but isn't for the simple reason that the monitor is a more accurate reflection of the amount of light available in a scene than the viewfinder on the camera. We often found that what seemed a bit dark in the viewfinder looked perfect on the monitor (and perfect in playback). Furthermore, it's usually easier to see the insidious boom mike descending into the scene on a monitor than it is using the viewfinder (imagine a large, fuzzy salami slowly edging its way into the shot from the direction of your choice, and you'll understand what I mean).
Filming a scene is an agonizingly slow process. First, you have to get the lighting right, and that can take a half hour or more of experimentation. Next, you have to check that the sound is sufficiently loud for the shot (run a "sound check"), which at 4 AM can be hard to remember. Last, you have to choreograph where the actors will walk in order to maintain the "artistic" nature of the shot, or at a more mundane level, stay ON camera. Next, you try to shoot the scene, which often must be re-shot because a) the Chinese lantern pops accidentally into view like that big, gyrating ball that trapped people in "The Prisoner," b) the boom mike, or boom arm, got into the shot, c) the sound decided it didn't feel like cooperating, or d) the evil directors decided they didn't like the acting in the scene. This can result in a single angle in a particular scene taking several hours.
As noted, we ended up with 17 hours of footage. We'll load all 17 hours onto a pair of 200GB external Firewire drives (1GB equals about 5 minutes of DV video), and edit them using standard desktop computers. This is the real power of the digital video format, allowing people with desktop computers to edit what in the past required expensive, specialized equipment.
Still, that 17 hours of video will take 3-4 months at a minimum to distill into a movie lasting about an hour and a half. No one likes to stare at the same camera angle for five minutes, a fact apparent when you start to look at movies from the standpoint of having to replicate what they're doing from a cinematic standpoint (I'll never look at movies the same way again). For that reason, we have a variety of angles on the same scene, and our job over the coming months will be to splice those angles into a cohesive whole that is visually interesting and fun to watch. Likewise, we'll have to include music, which we'll do after the movie has been completely edited.
The Revolution
Traditional filmmaking using photographic film is a
VERY expensive process. Besides the cost of renting
the equipment, the film stock itself is costly, and
the skills necessary to properly shoot and edit
traditional film take longer to acquire. Digital
filmmaking lowers the cost bar for filmmakers both in
terms of raw prices and the skills necessary to do it
properly. This will lead to more people having access
to the tools necessary to make movies.
Digital media is also far easier to distribute than traditional film. Traditional film is usually shipped in large rolls which are expensive to produce. In contrast, digital media can be downloaded over high-capacity connections via satellite. This greatly reduces the cost of distribution, and furthermore, puts film distribution within the reach of filmmakers without the resources of major studios.
Unfortunately, digital film distribution isn't feasible until movie houses shift to digital projection equipment. Like the barriers faced by electric cars in a world of gasoline stations, most movie houses have traditional film projection equipment. Furthermore, digital projection equipment costs around $150,000 per projector (versus $30,000 for a traditional projector) in a market where rapidly changing digital technology is likely to make that equipment obsolete in a few years.
Even without a market centered around digital projectors, the simple fact that more can aspire to make movies in the first place means more will be made. Those movies judged sufficiently interesting will find a buyer willing to go to the expense of converting a digital video to traditional film (a process that will cost about $30,000). Making a movie in the first place is the biggest issue, and digital video makes that process easier, and more critically, cheaper.
The Future
Digital filmmaking won't completely eclipse big
studios. Big studios are like the venture capital
firms of filmmaking. They have the bucks to finance
large productions, which includes things like actor
salaries, REAL sets (as opposed to sets stocked with knick-knacks from one of the directors' family home), and simple things like food and transportation. They also have an extensive promotion network, and are the first place movie theaters will turn when it comes to picking a movie with broad appeal.
The likely presence of "big" movie making companies, however, doesn't change the fact that digital media will allow more "independent" films to be produced and find a market. This will enrich the world of visual media, and provide fertile ground for smaller media production companies.
As a final point of interest, DV isn't the last word in digital video. Video quality with the Canon XL-1 is "good enough" as evidenced by the wide release and popularity of Mr. Boyle's horror epic, but still pales in comparison to traditional film. The real competitor to film, in terms of quality, is High Definition. High Definition, or HD, is touted as the video standard of the future, and is being actively promoted by the US government. HD is a format that matches the wide screens seen in theaters (even the CCDs on HD video cameras are shaped like movie screens, in contrast to the CCDs in the Canon XL-1, which are shaped like TV screens). High Definition digital video cameras already exist, with the high end occupied by cameras like this Sony HDWF900, and the consumer end starting up with cameras like the JVC GR-HD1.
Today, High Definition falls into the "prohibitively expensive" category (the HDWF900 will set you back a cool 100 grand), but then again, High Definition isn't exactly lighting the television world on fire...yet. When it does, prices can be expected to fall precipitously, and the last reason for continuing to use traditional film in the moviemaking process, not to mention video cameras that still think in terms of TV dimensions versus movie dimensions, will fall. High Definition would unify the theater and home viewing format, generating even more cost savings and widening the market for budget filmmakers looking for a place to sell their product.
The future for digital video is exceedingly bright, and its low cost is the surest path to its inevitable success.
biography
John Carroll is a software engineer living in Ireland. He specializes in the design and development of distributed systems using Java and .Net. He is also the founder of Turtleneck Software.
