Interviewed by Tom Mangan
Dean Mermell, digital filmmaker
AUTHORS
Michael Fuchs
Elizabeth Hilts
Paul Riddell
Gary Rivlin
Jim Motavalli
Barbara Shafferman
Jules Siegel
Keith Snyder
ARTISTS/POETS/
PHILOSOPHERS
Jon C. Allen
Will Baker
Mike Leung
Jon Sarkin
COOL SITE KEEPERS
Mike Cash
Scott O'Neal Colf
Godfrey Daniels
Cliff Davis, DDS
Tammy Hocking
Wes Modes
Frank Rogan
DIARISTS
Ralph Becker
J. D. Bruns
Linda DeVault
Mike Reed
Moira Richardson
Jessamyn West
FILMMAKERS
JOURNALISTS
Bernie
Mary Cooley-Jones
Lindsay Crysler
Jamie Dupree
M.O.A.T.M.A.I.
David Moll
Robert Niles
John Orr
Steven Ovadia
Pierce Presley
Mack Reed
Rip Rense
Curtis Ross
Neal Ross
John Scalzi
Catherine Seipp
David Sheets
Dwight Silverman
Matt Welch
MOVIE MAVENS
HUMORISTS
Debbie Farmer
Mike Jasper
Madeleine Begun Kane
Patrick Keller
Bob Sassone
Valerie Sprague
Ken Swarmer
Ian Wolff
SOLDIERS
TEACHERS
TECHIES
Chris Adamson
Mike Gunderloy
Michael Ivey
Greg Knauss
Floyd Maxwell
Ellen McDonough
Mike Pingleton
Wayne Thume
John Worth
TEENS
UNDECLARED
WEBLOGGERS
What are the basic tools someone must have to make these digital films they have at ifilm.com, and how much are they going to cost, in a ballpark figure?
The new storytelling technology that has become available to the consumer is extremely powerful. The convergence of wonderful, inexpensive cameras using the DV format, faster computers, and the data exchange protocol commonly known as FireWire, or ILINK (IEEE1394), has put the necessary tools into everyone's hands.
FireWire enables a user to download their images and sound directly from a camera or deck to their computer for editing with no loss of quality. For not much more than $3,000, it's possible for someone to get a simple DV camera and an iMac DV or other FireWire equipped computer and be making movies in their living room tonight.
My own editing station is actually composed of two systems. One is a medium-high end pro setup that can take the most-used professional analog tape format (BetaSP) and work with it at high resolutions. I have about $50,000 invested in it, including plenty of data storage and an entry-level BetaSP deck. My other system, which runs out of the same old Macintosh computer, uses a $500 FireWire capture card and a $700 disc drive, working with images captured via DV cameras. When I dump the final output onto BetaSP, only people who know what to look for can really tell the difference between the "pro" and the "consumer" equipment.
Of course, there will always be ways to spend more money to give you better tools, but the image quality from your FireWire system will not improve dramatically unless you spring for a better camera and learn how to use it.
What is interesting to me is that the concept of editing has come to the forefront, that much of the story gets told by the editor and how he or she uses their tools. This has classically been one of the hardest things for a filmmaker to get together, and now it's one of the easiest.
Expand on what you said about film editing being so far out of reach before, and so much within reach now. I always assumed film editing a highly technical discipline that takes years to learn. What are some of the editing tricks a layman can do with these new tools that were impossible a few years ago?
Until recently, the aspiring filmmaker had two choices for editing their movie. If it was shot on film and they planned to keep it in the film realm, they would have to edit on a traditional flatbed film editing rig. Even if you could get access to one, it's not the most flexible approach to editing ... although there are some people who refuse to do it any other way, and that's valid (the slower pace and physical hands-on aspects of the process enhances their ability to tell the story).
The other alternative was to rent time in an expensive editing facility running an Avid, Media 100, or other high-end nonlinear system. Although there were plenty of places to offer this, learning the software takes time and the film maker has to pay for that time.
The big breakthrough in the last one or two years has been the affordability of intelligent software editing tools that will run on a personal computer. Although editing is as much of a skill as blowing glass or writing or painting, it's one that an observant and determined person can learn much of by watching television and movies, and there's certainly enough of that around in our culture. Editing is a storyteller's art that has been out of reach of all but the specialists who practice it. Now, it's a populist's medium. With varying levels of quality, it's possible to achieve much of what you see on television with an investment of a few thousand dollars in hardware and software.
In my film "Modern Life," we created an effect of a ghost rising up out of someone's body with some careful planning and a software program that cost about $600.
In "Modern Life," you had actors, a soundtrack, a film crew and your own extensive film vocabulary and professional skills to draw upon. How can the technology help someone who lacks these critical assets?
Technology, at its best, serves content and story. There are many people producing work these days that is interesting only insomuch as the tools used to produce it give it an interesting look. But I think that is a separate thing from film making. Rules were made to be broken, but ignoring them completely is silly. Just because you designed a new car doesn't and shouldn't mean you need to reinvent the wheel. Many film making conventions are antiquated or formulaic, as is much of television, but there's a lot you can learn from how people have learned to do these things over the last hundred or so years.
I believe Modern Life is successful largely because we denied ourselves the luxuries (and problems) of dialog and color. In producing a "film" that was very much like an old silent movie, we were forced to rely on strong visual storytelling elements. This inherent limitation was a great exercise in making me strip away the unnecessary dreck that seems to permeate a lot of modern media, while still using the technology and effects available to us. But always in the support of story.
The idea for the ghosts actually came from watching a Buster Keaton movie called “Sherlock Junior.” He plays a projectionist in a movie theater who falls asleep next to the projector one night, and his "spirit" gets up out of his body and goes downstairs and jumps into the action on the screen. He did this by superimposing two images one on top of the other. We accomplished the same thing digitally, but still had to shoot the same scene twice and overlay it just like he did. In the end, I think Buster's technique may have actually been more efficient. ... I sure love the way it looks.
OK, I've always been interested in moves, taken a film class or two, and am tempted to make the investment in digital moviemaking gear. What should I look into before I leap?
This is a very small question with a huge amount of answers!
The camera you get should have a FireWire (also known as iLink , or IEEE1394) port. There are lots of DV cameras on the market now with varying quality and features. The more manual controls you can get, the more flexibility you'll have in your film making. If you can afford a three chip camera, you will get markedly better image quality than you will in a single chip unit. Three chip cameras start at about $2200.
Your new computer may already have an onboard FireWire connector or you can buy a card that fits into an available PCI slot in your older Mac or PC that will give you an IEEE1394 port. Some of these cards come with editing software and some require that you purchase the software separately. Your computer should be as fast as possible, have a powerful graphics card, and plenty of fast disc storage.
It's impossible to know how to advise people about these things in a general way. One thing I do is act as a consultant to people and companies who want to get going with digital video (I'm not cheap). In any major town, there are places that teach video production and the digital arts such as Photoshop and multimedia applications. Take a class or two before you drop any cash, and you'll have a much better idea about what to get. Pick the teacher's brain. Go to big news stands and look for magazines like RES, DV, AV Video and Multimedia.
If you have a computer already, try the Adobe Classroom in a Book series, for programs like Premiere and After Effects. They're great, step by step lesson plans that come with a CD with the media you need for the lessons. You must have a working copy of the software to go through the lessons. Take your time and learn the software basics. And remember that it's silly to jump into any of this before you learn your computer's basic operating system.
What do you think mainstream Hollywood studios could learn from the new breed of digital filmmakers?
Film making has grown from what was originally a little cottage industry of artists and technical innovators to an enormous money making machine which employs many thousands of people at incredibly uneven pay scales. The digital filmmaking revolution democratizes the entire film making process, mirroring the roots of the early French and American pioneers who first worked with the medium.
The pre-production, production, and post-production pipeline is well established in Hollywood. Although special effects technology has changed a lot about how movies are shot and posted, the studio selection process, unionized work flow, and bloated budgets have become a tower of babel that must eventually fall under its own ponderous weight. And digital film making will be the medium of choice for internet and DVD delivery, which may radically change our experience of home entertainment.
Independent film has become not only fashionable, it's attractive for financial reasons. As the tools for "home" digital film making get sharper and cheaper, we are bound to see a growth in both high and low quality content. This pressure from below is going to motivate the Hollywood studios to start producing things that really matter, since everybody will be able to make some kind of movie soon.
When I do newspaper design, there’s always an internal battle over what I *can* do with the computer (crazy fonts, garish colors, sideways pictures, etc.) vs. what I *should* do (clean and functional, content driven, etc.) What are some of the things you see beginning filmmakers do that they really shouldn’t be doing?
The whole school of MTV style shooting and editing has done a lot for breaking boundaries. But it's also legitimized a lot of "bad habits", like crazy camera work, quick cuts that go nowhere, and general eye candy that shock and entertain the viewer for a moment but don't support the story. It's the old saw of style at the expense of substance. Any effect that makes you go "wow" today is pretty much guaranteed to make you yawn tomorrow, unless there's a reason for it in the script.
There are lots of effects available in current software programs that are just useless to me, personally. I can't think of a reason why I would ever want to use them. I do use a lot of effects in my work, but many people make their buying and creative decisions on these things, believing it's what is going to set their work apart. If anything, it will just help classify them as "that kind" of film maker. Ultimately, it's your ability to tell a story with or without these tools in a humanly engaging way that is going to get your work noticed by more than just your friends and family.
My advice to people just starting out is to make a couple of pieces just edited in camera. Concentrate on things like storyboarding a short piece, scripting a little meaningful dialog, shot composition. Figure out which shots should be tight, wide, locked down on a tripod, or handheld. Watch any film you love closely with the sound off. Then just listen to the sound and don't look at the picture. Isolate the basic elements of this kind of storytelling, and you'll learn a lot. A good film maker can do more with super 8 camera and five minutes of film than any hot shot with a high-def camera and unlimited finances.
Digital video opens wide avenues of expression in works of fiction, but in nonfiction -- TV news springs immediately to mind -- there's a huge potential for manipulation of reality. Say you're a digital documentarian: How do you avoid the temptation to do with video trickery what you were unable to actually get into your camera?
Wow, Tom, I didn't realize you were so paranoid!
Aside from the possibility that the media is trying to put one over on us (this has probably been true since before the invention of type), the manipulation of perceived reality has always been something we seem to do. But a lie is a lie, in any form. Some lies are harmless, some aren't. I'm presently finishing cutting a documentary I shot last year. In the course of telling this story, some shots make a lot more sense in another place in the timeline then when they were actually shot. I don't have a secret agenda with this piece, I don't have any qualms moving a few things around, and it's an artistic decision that I feel works better and involves the viewer on a deeper level, which is what it's all about. Some might view this as a kind of manipulation, but I think it's harmless enough in this context.
The technology definitely exists to put something over on somebody though. For example, there's a huge business now with gathering video depositions. A good editor might be able to doctor things somebody says on camera, somebody could win a case unjustifiably, and nobody would be the wiser. Fortunately there are limits as to how video is used as evidence and in the courtroom.
I think it's important to remember the phrase "perceived reality". What is a story, and what is "real" life? Witness the Blair Witch hoopla. It became obvious fairly quickly that those events were staged for the camera, even though it was presented as video verite. We seem to like our fiction imitating reality, and our reality to be a fiction. I think this may say more about our shortcomings as human beings than anything having to do with digital cinema. There's life, and then there's art...in that order.
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