Personally I'd shoot HDV, unless you have a sizeable budget. I don't think it's really going to be much easier to sell a 16mm feature than an HD feature... if the movie is good, the budget is right and you get it in front of the right people, someone will probably buy it.

And, let's face it, most low-budget features will only ever get a DVD release and maybe a few TV showings.

BTW, where in the UK are you? If you're near London I might be able to help out next year with editing and maybe some on-set work... I don't have much booked in yet.

Hi Mark
Thanks for replying. All logic would suggest to use HDV, I was just wondering in case it would cripple the chances of the film being taken seriously. Plus, let's face it, film has a certain old-school charm to it!
I'm based in Hampshire, so maybe that's a bit far away? Still, any help is appreciated even at distance, and likewise in return.

If you want to be taken seriously, get a name actor, and then they won't care in the slightest about what format you shoot on :).

Depends on where in Hampshire you are, it's quite big. But if you need a free edit and it's a decent script I may be able to do that.

Also I should have Digital Fusion 5 soon if you need any fancy compositing effects.

What's your opinion on the Magic Bullet Suite software? I have it, but have so far never used it. Is that worth considering (along with good lighting) in order to lost that 'You've Been Framed' look of video?

Haven't used it, unfortunately. I'm told it has one of the best deinterlacers -- it tries to detect motion in the frame and only deinterlace the parts that move -- but that's about my only knowledge of it.

The main issues with video vs film are that film records light logarithmically whereas video records linearly, and film has a much higher contrast range. AFAIR film handles about 3-4 stops more than the best HD camera, and the best HD camera itself is 3-4 stops beyond what the best HDV or DVCAM camera can handle: but you can work around that to some extent with careful lighting.

Hopefully this should be ok for my project then. My setup includes a Mac with Final Cut Studio, After Effects, Lightwave and Magic Bullet, which hopefully should cover post-production?

Should be enough for pretty much anything :).

Nice. Well, I spose the hard work starts here then. Have you written/directed features? What was it like doing the first one?

I've written several, but none have been produced yet: I wrote a couple deliberately designed to keep costs low to make myself, but without a good blagger even they turned out to be too expensive for the moment. Otherwise I've only done editing, camerawork and general dogsbody work on other people's features.

As for the first one, I started writing it in 1998, shot part of it on video as a test, and finished the first draft this year :). However, I'd written two more in the meantime... again it was a case of 'hey, this is a good idea that could be cheap to do' which I kept putting off as the cost grew and grew. Certainly I'd have no hope of funding that one myself the way it's currently written.

What was it that caused them to be prohibitively expensive?

In the case of the cheap ones, it was mostly locations. For example, I originally had access to a wood, so I wrote a horror script set there, but by the time it was finisehd I'd lost access to the location and would have had to pay money to get another one. Also accomodation for the cast and crew would have cost a few thousand if they weren't prepared to live in tents... and, frankly, I wouldn't want to do that myself for two weeks so I couldn't really ask them to do so.

For the original feature, it needs lots of extras and access to a couple of villages, police, military, and so on... even the five minutes we shot on video ended up costing a couple of thousand pounds, we were hoping we could do the entire movie on super-16 film for twenty to fifty thousand, so that put us off the idea.

Really, it's all the things you don't think about that kill you when you try to shoot on very low budgets: accomodation, transport, food, toilets (if you're shooting in the middle of nowhere), props, etc. For example, the last short I made we were trying to keep the budget under a thousand pounds, but just having to hire a van for a few days to transport props and equipment around since no-one had a large enough car to do so immediately ate up over 10% of that.

Yeah I see your point!! The idea I have in mind is centred around two houses, a coffee shop, and general streets and stuff. I'm hoping that these locations won't be too difficult to obtain.

If you want to do something really cheap these days I think you basically have two choices: either write it around a small number of characters in a small number of generic locations and have the plot driven by conflict between the characters, or go the 'Star Wreck' route and do an SF epic almost entirely in front of blue screens.

For example, a few weeks ago I watched part of an old crime movie from the 70s whose title I've forgotten: some crooks kidnap the step-daughter of a guy who works for a diamond company, then go to him and say 'here's her ear, give us diamonds or we'll kill her'. He says 'sure, go ahead. I'd been hoping something like this would happen, if she dies before she's twenty-one I get a million bucks from her trust fund.. why do you think I married her mother?'. So they're then stuck with his step-daughter and he's not going to pay up, one of the crooks wants to kill her, the others never seriously thought they'd have to do it... which, at least in the parts that I saw, created a pretty interesting story with a couple of houses, a street, a hut in the middle of nowhere and a few actors. Even I could probably manage to blag that cheaply.

That's what my plan is, to use generic locations. The script takes place in really ordinary, average places although the story deals with extraordinary events. I've been using M. Night Shyamalan films as a model, as his films, despite being big-budget star vehicles could in theory have been done on much lesser budgets.