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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Scarlet = No More Excuses

DV for theatrical features did have the advantage of demanding that the viewer not judge the visuals based on the conventions of slick professional studio filmmaking, normally in 35mm. Either the viewer accepted that the low-rez DV image was an intentional aesthetic choice, or was justifiable in some narrative manner, or was acceptable enough in quality so that the story and acting could be followed... or the viewer rejected it.

Higher-end digital though comes so close to 35mm that it tends to ask the viewer to judge it by traditional standards; it falls into more accepted aesthetic modes of filmmaking. But when you start talking about an image that will be judged against the standard of 35mm, then falling short of that standard may be construed as a mistake. It's sort of the problem I had with some Super-16 features that opted for a standard studio style visually -- most viewers think that they are just watching mediocre 35mm photography, not Super-16 photography. Maybe many viewers wouldn't care, but the misleading impression is of a certain technical incompetence or lack of budget to "do things right", whereas with the Super-16 movies that opted to push a certain "small format" aesthetic, at least it seemed more obvious that the look was intentional.
 
I plan on putting as much energy and passion into my scripts as I do into the images that end up on the SSD. Scarlet will be a tool and nothing else. That being said, I don't think there could be a more exciting time to be an aspiring filmmaker. To think that that the no-budget films I'll be shooting in a year or so with a bunch of friends/colleagues might end up looking just as good as millions-dollars-budgets films out of Hollywood is simply mind-blowing. I just hope that we're able to take full advantage of it all.

Oh, and Once was a wonderful, wonderful film. See it!
 
Charles Castonguay said:
To think that that the no-budget films I'll be shooting in a year or so with a bunch of friends/colleagues might end up looking just as good as millions-dollars-budgets films out of Hollywood is simply mind-blowing.
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Well, you can think that. But it will only be true if you also have the same level of production design, costume design, hair and makeup expertise, lighting package and lighting expertise, knowledge and use of lenses and filtration, grip equipment (and a dolly grip) to ensure smooth, elegant camera movement, and post production talent that they do.

I really think people are getting a bit carried away with what can be accomplished with no budget and no professional crew just because a camera can capture a higher resolution image. What you see on the screen is the sum total of many different departments and many different talents. If you put on a play on an empty stage with minimal lighting, it's not going to look like a Broadway extravaganza no matter how much you want it to, and regardless of the fact that both are on a wooden stage. There's a lot more to creating high end film images than a camera.
 
mmost said:
Well, you can think that. But it will only be true if you also have the same level of production design, costume design, hair and makeup expertise, lighting package and lighting expertise, knowledge and use of lenses and filtration, grip equipment (and a dolly grip) to ensure smooth, elegant camera movement, and post production talent that they do.

I really think people are getting a bit carried away with what can be accomplished with no budget and no professional crew just because a camera can capture a higher resolution image. What you see on the screen is the sum total of many different departments and many different talents. If you put on a play on an empty stage with minimal lighting, it's not going to look like a Broadway extravaganza no matter how much you want it to, and regardless of the fact that both are on a wooden stage. There's a lot more to creating high end film images than a camera.
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Bang on.

A friend of mine recently put together a quote for a $250K commercial shoot. He said the difference between RED and 35mm was $18K.
 
mmost said:
Well, you can think that. But it will only be true if you also have the same level of production design, costume design, hair and makeup expertise, lighting package and lighting expertise, knowledge and use of lenses and filtration, grip equipment (and a dolly grip) to ensure smooth, elegant camera movement, and post production talent that they do.

I really think people are getting a bit carried away with what can be accomplished with no budget and no professional crew just because a camera can capture a higher resolution image. What you see on the screen is the sum total of many different departments and many different talents. If you put on a play on an empty stage with minimal lighting, it's not going to look like a Broadway extravaganza no matter how much you want it to, and regardless of the fact that both are on a wooden stage. There's a lot more to creating high end film images than a camera.
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In some cases, a low-budget Scarlet shoot can look every bit as good as big-budget film.

It depends on what you are shooting. If you are shooting a beautiful sunset from atop Mount Whitney for National Geographic, then yes, Scarlet will allow you to shoot something that could come close to equaling 35mm film (which frankly would not even be worth the 22-mile hike to shoot on an HVX or HDV or DV camera). This assumes that Scarlet is used properly and color corrected properly. The budget for this shot would probably be a couple of blisters on your feet.

Certain shots CAN match 35mm, big-budget quality. It entirely depends on what you are shooting and how you are shooting it.
 
If one looks at narrative feature distribution only through the bottleneck of mega corporation dominated US theatrical/TV markets the picture is bleak indeed. However the emergence of truly high quality digital projection at modest costs for small to medium size venues could potentially mean the reemergence of significant markets similar to the vibrant 16mm distribution market that existed in the 1960's and 70's: museums, schools, art houses, coffee houses, film clubs. We can only hope.

Some friends of mine used to run a successful single screen 250 seat art house cinema in the 70's that showed a lot of interesting off beat dramatic films, both foreign and domestic, that seldom made it to chain theater distribution in the US. There are still literate audiences who find little of interest from the Hollywood film mills.

We went to see a program of award winning European shorts yesterday that turned out to be much more entertaining than I thought they would be. The video projection was mediocre, but the 400 seat venue was packed and the audience quite enjoyed the program.
 
Tom said:
It depends on what you are shooting. If you are shooting a beautiful sunset from atop Mount Whitney for National Geographic, then yes, Scarlet will allow you to shoot something that could come close to equaling 35mm film (which frankly would not even be worth the 22-mile hike to shoot on an HVX or HDV or DV camera). This assumes that Scarlet is used properly and color corrected properly. The budget for this shot would probably be a couple of blisters on your feet.

Certain shots CAN match 35mm, big-budget quality. It entirely depends on what you are shooting and how you are shooting it.
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It really didn't sound to me like the original poster was planning on making a movie comprised entirely of stock shots and second unit plates.
 
These discussions get all the more frustrating, when you consider that the U.S. did have a workable and self-sustaining alternative cinema movement -- studio B-pictures, later succeeded by independent producers like Roger Corman, who gave opportunities to unknowns like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

If the whole movement, in all its trash and artfulness, was eventually killed off by changing distribution patterns and home video, it does point to what was necessary: a stable production apparatus, reliable funding, and a reasonable prospect that investment will be recouped.

But without any of that structure, and none of the financial certainty, and reliance on private and self-funding, it doesn't matter what camera you're using. There's no way for directors to work enough to learn the craft or writers to realize their material, and there's rarely enough money to make films at funding levels equal to their dramatic illusions. On the plus side, you never know who will come along, and anyone can give it a try, which is great for democracy, but that freedom to fail doesn't seem to matter much. The structure just isn't there for quality, anymore more than you'd expect a competitive industry to emerge if it only came out of people's garages, or was dependent on real estate speculators or somebody's rich uncle.

So, out of this hopeless wannabe culture, we have disputes over the value of camera resolution, and folks somehow persuade themselves they'll be competitive with Hollywood if they own a 3K camera, or they have dreams of that fluke festival success, which may or may not lead to a career in Hollywood, and a few more movies

But the truth is, expectations of art-house success, or just earning a living as an art-house director in the U.S., verge on the ridiculous.... About the same odds as becoming an A-list star, whether you're shooting DV or IMAX. Is it still possible? Of course. But that's no basis for quality non-Hollywood moviemaking, or an esteemed art-house tradition, or real possibilities in the medium. What you get is what we in fact have in the U.S.: Sundance, and all the attendant careerism and hype. And a number of Sundance alumni, some famous, but very few able to compete on the international arthouse circuit. This doesn't mean they deserve to starve or haven't achieved anything, just that the system isn't working well.

Scarlet can't change these fundamentals. The unwatchable and the unmarketable will just look a bit better than they used to. So I'd say there are still plenty of excuses left for anyone looking for a reason not to make a movie. Besides, you won't be missed.
 
Certainly one could design a project where all you needed was a good camera & tripod to get a visually stunning movie -- few actors, free but spectacular locations, tiny crew, minimum transportation costs, etc.

But for better or worse, most movies are designed around the story, which may be modified after it is written to deal with budgetary restrictions. It's harder to write good script the other way around (starting out first with all the restrictions that would increase budget) because the story wants to flow a certain way.

So it's amazing how complicated even a simple story can be to shoot, and how it may affect the budget in certain ways. Maybe your script involves a crowd scene, for example, where people have to be dressed in a certain way.

Maybe it involves shooting in a large office space for a week straight, longer than you could borrow an existing office for -- I had that problem on a 1-mil feature I shot in HD years ago... script was mostly set in a high-powered studio producer's office, with a staff of script readers, etc. Due to the number of pages that took place there, we figured we needed about nine full shooting days in an office to cover those scenes, and the office had to be somewhat well-furnished and designed, it couldn't just be some fold-up tables against a white wall.

We could not find any existing office that would let us take over the space for nine days straight. Most would give us one weekend, tops. So then it became a question of whether we could find an abandoned office with all the furniture left in and rent that, which we couldn't find. So then it became an issue of creating this office space. By the time we were done, it worked out just as cheap to build the office spaces on a soundstage than go on location and dress and light something.

So it was tough on the budget, but THAT was the story -- it was about people who worked in a nice, expensively-furnished office space because they all worked for a powerful producer in Hollywood.

I've often found that a constant challenge in low-budget filmmaking was telling stories about rich people, because they live in big homes, drive expensive cars, wear expensive clothing, etc. And if you don't get the details right, it just makes your movie look even more low-budget than it really is.

You could say "just don't write stories about anything that would cost money to recreate for a movie" but writers' imaginations don't work that way. Look at "Northfork" -- we shot that for 1.5 mil in 24 days, but the story takes place in the 1950's and is about an entire town being moved to make way for a giant dam being built that will flood the valley. How do you pull off the period elements needed to tell this story? We ended up building three HOUSES just to match what was described in the script, and there were a number of details never filmed, like seeing a fleet of houses on flatbed trailers being driven across the prairies. A lot of it was slight of hand -- for example, we found a closed-down army base in Montana with empty homes and a lot of slabs left over and used that to establish some of the story elements. So we pulled it off... but it was definitely a case where the script was not written with the notion to make it easy to shoot on a low budget.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Certainly one could design a project where all you needed was a good camera & tripod to get a visually stunning movie -- few actors, free but spectacular locations, tiny crew, minimum transportation costs, etc.
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For the last ten years, a day hasn't gone by when I haven't pondered this question, and tried to resolve it with a variety of techniques, traditional and invented.

Nothing doing. There's probably an answer somewhere, but it can only be arrived at naturally, organically, as the genuine outgrowth of a particular vision, not as a goal to be achieved after-the-fact, by calculation.

Also, I think you need to be able to accept the limitations of the method. You can't dream of traditional dramatic effects, either for yourself or the audience, and expect to achieve them in this way.

So, in effect, this movie has been made. It's just that nobody much likes it.
 
Then assuming you are making a film like Baraka with a crew of one then no worries. Making a narrative film on the other hand generally requires a minimum of four weeks shooting (on the very lean end) and a commitment from a crew and actors. You might be able to secure this for free (maybe once, rarely twice). The scars of such endeavours are frequently visible on screen. Read Joe Queenans book "the unkindest cut (or "how a hatchet man critic made a movie for $7000 and put it all on his credit card") as a primer (final cost of his film? Over one hundred grand). Funny book.
 
As some one who makes a living shooting movies and TV shows, the idea of low/no budget shows does nothing to turn me on. Who wants to work on a movie for crap money with shitty food, for long hours with a bunch of amateurs? I just don't get the whole "I should be able to make a movie because I have an idea!" thing. Making movies is hard. People screw it up even when they have vast resources and talented crew.

Having a decent or a crappy camera doesn't make making a movie any easier or harder.

The truth is making movies is hard. If you do it for 5 years, you will begin to understand how much you have to learn about it.

The film industry is one of the last apprentice based crafts in the states. If you want to work in the film industry, recognize that it's a major commitment that will take you 10 years to get somewhere in, learn from people and enjoy it. It's truly wonderful.

There are no short cuts, and the more you learn the more you realize how much you have to learn.

I will now sit back and listen to the hundreds of posts proving me wrong and telling me I am an elitist asshole ;-)

Cheers,

Nick
 
mmost said:
It really didn't sound to me like the original poster was planning on making a movie comprised entirely of stock shots and second unit plates.
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I was trying to illustrate a point. Taken to the extremes, yes, a Scarlet COULD shoot 35mm-caliber shots... if paid actors, costumes, lighting, sets, etc, are not needed. Like wildlife shooting for National Geographic. These new cameras will be great for shooting lion kills, for example, because of the high framerates, the image quality of the cameras, and the ability to shoot endlessly and erase useless footage on the fly. These new cameras will be marvelous for those purposes, assuming you can handle the batteries, heat, and data requirements.

BTW, I hope you are not dismissing the artistic value of cinematography that might be found in a film like Baraka as "stock shots and second unit plates." Both narrative and non-narrative cinematography can be high artforms. Some might even argue that non-narrative stays truer to origins of cinema, where image resides at the apex of the art. :bleh: :biggrin:

I do appreciate the conversation here regarding how smaller independent films can be made and distributed to compete with studio and larger-budget projects. It's an interesting topic. So do carry on!
 
Tom said:
Some might even argue that non-narrative stays truer to origins of cinema, where image resides at the apex of the art. :bleh: :biggrin:
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It's a point worth considering, particularly in an age of talky and self-explicating TV and movies, but you wanna be careful here. Virtually all the cinematic genres, the ones we use today, from Westerns to gangster films to domestic melodramas to precursors of "Vertigo", were in place before 1915 and well-worn by 1920.

Like it or not, cinema has always been rooted in melodrama and popular theatrical and narrative traditions. Also, it's hard to believe, but there's often more dialogue in silent films (observed dialogue, that is), than in many Hollywood movies today.
 
Reservoir dogs is a good paradigm to make a low budget movie. Low number of actors. Simple & cheap costume requirements. Low number of extras. Film script can be reduced to one location in the event of a budget crush. 2 action sequences that can be trimmed according to circumstance but not really lynchpins of the script - these sequences can then be used to Market the film .

In short: 6 actors. 6 costumes. 1 location. 1 lighting rig (assuming you leave it up for the shoot). Less logistics. Fewer electricians. Less location managers Etc.

The only way I could envisage reducing that scenario is to shoot daylight but then you have weather dependancy & light continuity.

Similarly "saw" or "Glengarry Glenross" are, in principle, good examples of stretching resources to their maximum.
 
Yeah, Reservoir Dogs is a good example.

Another would be Malick's debut, Badlands. It takes advantage of "free" outdoor settings, and "free" good available light. Number of actors is low. Number of complicated scenes is low. Certain roadtrip-style movies like this can be done well and fairly cheaply. Y Tu Mama comes to mind.

A lot of Asian films like Millennium Mambo are examples of tiny budget productions that come out quite well.

Another example of extremely low budget shooting that really worked well was LeBute's In the Company of Men.
 
Yes, in theory, that could all work - in practice, you run into a number of obstacles that could impact your budget even with a very simple concept. You'd be surprised what unexpected things can bite you in the a-- financially once you start making a movie, from prep thru post, especially when you toss in a name actor into the mix. But even without that element, even a simple location can give you headaches, or a simple stunt.

As soon as you have a cast and crew on a payroll, even a low one, then time = money and there are any number of things that can impact your time spent and thus your budget.
 
I always felt the "No More Excuses" statement began with the Sony VX1000 and the first firewire card.

Even before that, I remember seeing an AFI short shot on Digibeta, transfered to 35mm, thinking "This isn't film, but it sure doesn't look like video"

I think Scarlet just builds on what's already been established, equipment getting better and affordable.

What I hope to see, is a more diverse alternative cinema. With the current state of independent film, I think it's a good time for it.

It's hard to compete with Hollywood, so why try. It's better to do the movies Hollywood always avoids. These movies may not get the big wide release, but is that a bad thing?

Some of the best movies of all time, found their audience way after their theatrical release, on home video, cable and network tv. I feel the audience can be found, it just takes much more time.

If we could see an overview of how many movies have already been made worldwide, we'll realize we've only seen a sliver of them. Even if we never saw or heard of them, someone has.

We had great innovation in the last decade, and the next few should even be more amazing.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next innovations are in distribution and marketing, where people who want to see something unique and the filmmakers who make those unique films can discover each other.
 
I reiterate: "the unkindest cut" by Joe Queenan. A funny and true read. His 7000 dollar movie that ended up costing over 100000. He decided at a certain point that he would maintain the story that the film cost 7000, no matter what - Because he wanted to maintain the mythical benchmark set by El Mariachi. Even when his film cost well into six figures.
 
Niche marketing and micro-distribution are probably the keys... but I would miss the days when an "art" film could have a larger impact and become part of the common culture.

The problem is that there are more potential viewers than ever, spread across the planet, so how does a maker of independent art films get the word out? Even when I look at a program guide for a film festival, I see dozens, if not a hundred, of titles of movies with no clue as to which I should see and which I should ignore, other than a plot description. As a consumer, even of art fare, we need some sort of marketplace mechanisms to help us choose what to watch. That tends to involve some form of marketing, it involves film reviewers, etc. And that system tends to cost money to engage.
 
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