Hi,

This is mainly just an introduction-type post, but I wouldn't mind some opinions if anybody has any 🙂 I've long been interested in film making (I love video technology and when I was younger would attempt and have the family join in on making silly Star Trek-esque things at Christmas/etc. My Uncle is a Trekkie so props were plentiful 😉 However, I've not done anything for a while (after attempting to at High School and not really getting anything done, about 7 years ago) other than a few short clips that were for a University multimedia course (I'm a Software Engineer these days).

Anyway, here we are now, not done anything for ages. I have a Sony TRV-120E, which I bought discounted for ?450 ($771 at today's exchange rate) when it was End of Line a few years ago. I love it, it has 25x optical zoom, a nice picture (reviews at the time described it as 'broadcast quality with good lighting', and as it's the PAL model it's at 720x576), night vision (I've sat in the back garden recording nocturnal creatures wandering around with it in the past), extra features which can be unlocked via hacking (I have done so 😉 like zebra pattern for overexposure, and manual focus (sadly via a focusing ring that's hooked into the camera CPU which does the real focusing, so it has a bit of a soft feel), although it's Digital8 and I don't know if that's as good as other varieties (logic tells me it should just be recording the same raw data as other formats, but experience tells me manufacturers are insane and things are not always what the seem 🙂

Anyway, I'm just wondering how others got started out. I'm plotting to use friends as a source of free actors, at least to begin with (I'd have no idea where to find anyone else local to help anyway) For an initial idea I was thinking of making a series of short films depicting ghost stories from various books I have (such as "The Gazatteer of Scottish Ghosts"), so I could experiment with different styles in an attempt to create more of an atmosphere.