Practical DV filmmaking

Russell Evans
Focal Press

ISBN-13: 978-0240807386

This is an ambitious and expansive book which seeks to give the aspiring filmmaker a grounding in both the technicalities of creating a movie and the creative processes of conceiving and realising their ideas in moving images.

The book is logically structured according to the steps you might go through if starting from scratch to create a movie. After looking at film forms and genres, it covers pre-production including selecting a DV camera, working out a budget, writing a script, and so on. The production section includes advice on lighting, audio, a variety of genres, and numerous projects devised to clarify some of the pitfalls and some of the pleasures of film-making. Post-production and distribution includes editing on computer, compression for the internet, and various ways of publicising the finished work. The accompanying CD-ROM contains a list of film festivals and interviews with various filmmakers.

Practical DV Film-making is especially strong in dealing with the pre-production and production stages. General advice on how to put a film together is very good and clearly based on extensive experience. Examples are pertinent, and the author’s ideas, though strongly felt, are not put dogmatically. The practicalities of filming are covered in detail. The author is keen to encourage ambition while stressing the limitations of zero budgets and the importance of keeping your feet firmly on the ground. The projects are varied and interesting (some seem more practical than others) and teach useful skills which will help to develop film-making ability.

The book is less useful as a step-by-step manual in how to set up your computer as an editing workstation, capture footage and output to tape or DVD. Technical details are inevitably generic and so difficult to apply to a specific machine. The writer seems to be less secure in his knowledge of computers than he is about filming, and the book betrays some confusion about the role of RAM while capturing video to disk (p 218). Product recommendations are sound, but the technology is changing monthly, and much of the specific information on model numbers and variations will soon be out of date (e.g. the Sony TRV 900 was superseded by the TRV 950 several months ago). The editing software recommendations are good but leave out a major low budget options: the Studio range from Pinnacle, probably the most flexible and comprehensive software in its price bracket for any platform. Vegas Video is said to be ‘very expensive’ compared to Premiere 6, but if the user has a sufficiently powerful computer it provides real-time preview: a useful time-saving feature that Premiere only managed with version 6.5. That said, anyone reading this book ought to be able to get their workstation up and running, and edit a film without recourse to another source, which is after all what the book is for.

The author encourages us to read the book in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, navigation can be difficult and irritating, as references to related sections are given in the form ‘Chapter x:y’ while pages are numbered sequentially from the beginning. This makes this cross-referencing much less useful than it could have been, and I soon gave up looking for these additional links.

The associated CD has a limited range of material, much of it available elsewhere in more convenient form. The film festivals listed come with a telephone number but no URL. The interviews with film-makers are interesting however, and well worth including in this form since there was no space for them in the book. The demo programs (Adobe Premiere 6, Adobe AfterEffects 5.5 and PureMotion EditStudio 2) are a useful opportunity to try out sophisticated software that may inspire the filmmaker in the quest for greater control over the final output.

Overall, this is a useful book with a lot to say. If you have the technical knowledge already (particularly computer knowledge), it’s a great introduction to actually making a film.

Tomas Lewis