(rough draft)
How do you get started in filmmaking?
Short answer: You get started by picking up a camera, filming some project, finishing it, then getting mad at why it’s not as good as you imagined, then going and searching for the answers for why it’s not. then repeating that process. you get started by learning how to shoot something that is pretty and sounds good and is entertaining to your target audience, whether that’s your grandma or general American movie-goers. Then the next step is learning how to lead other people to help you get done what your project needs done by communicating clearly and not being a jerk.
When it comes to image quality, really, it ALL depends on your preferences and goals. Some filmmakers shoot, still on VHS cameras, because that crappy image quality is what they want for their project, and sometimes it works for that project. But that’s easy. It’s easy to create stuff of poor technical quality. Saying “it’s okay that it’s bad because that’s the style I want” just prevents you from growing and improving. For me, I demand that “this will look and sound indistinguishable from a Hollywood film in terms of image and sound” and that pushes me to KEEP improving with each project. “Show me you KNOW the rules, then break them at your leisure. But learn the rules FIRST.”
0: I don't consider myself a successful filmmaker yet, so maybe I'm wrong about everything. I have done this a LOT though, so extract what is useful to you and discard the rest, and you'll have a better resume than I do in no time and you'll be able to skip the years of silliness I've had to go through to learn these tricks.
So to get decent image quality, approaching Hollywood level, there are a few simple tricks that may save you years of school.
1. if it’s not in the frame, it doesn’t matter. If it’s not large in the frame, it’s details don’t matter. figuring out when to spend time making something perfect or accurate (like a toy gun looking like a real gun) only matters in the proportion to how clear it will be to the audience. a banana spray-painted black can serve as a fine gun if the gun will only appear far away. In a world with limited resources, knowing what corners you CAN cut without anyone noticing, versus the ones that NEED to be correct, can make the difference between having the resources to finish the project or not. This also means that if you’re building a set, knowing what angles you’ll be filming from COULD save your from having to build walls, a floor, a ceiling, etc., that you’ll never see. On the other hand, the more complete and detailed a set is, the more freedom you have upon arrival, to create new shots and add new details you didn’t plan for. Finding that balance, and knowing when to push, and when to let something slide, is your JOB.
2. the feeling is more important than the math. you can arrange actors in super unrealistic ways, as long as it feels right in the final image. same thing with props, or even where you film. The audience knows NOTHING you don’t show them, and the less you show them, the more their minds will fill in the blanks, building out pieces of the set in their minds and saving you the money of actually making them.
So here are the simple image tricks to cheaply approach the feel of Hollywood imagery: FEW DWSAS. Focus, exposure, white balance. Deep, wide, shallow, alive, and smooth. I’ll explain these, and I’d live to make a youtube video that starts ugly and adds each element until it looks AAA quality. There’s a lot of ugly garbage in Hollywood. i’m not talking about that. The best that Hollywood has to offer, is the best the world has to offer, in terms of beautiful imagery.
I clip images from videos and films whenever I go “ooh” then I try to duplicate them and get mad when i can’t and go find out why not then get better. This way you can hone in on what you want and what your technical targets should be, which will be different from each. But these rules apply to default professional quality imagery. my focus is comedy and romantic comedy, too, and that also affects these things (like wanting lively, warm, inviting imagery instead of cold, dead, scary imagery)
Focus: focus on the catch lights in your actor’s eyes. Also, make sure you have catch lights (glints) in your actor’s eyes.
Exposure: make sure your subjects are not too bright (washed out/burnt out) or too dark. Having a histogram on your camera helps.
White Balance: set your white balance each time your light changes so your image doesn’t appear hideously blue or hideously orange. If you make a mistake, learn how to color correct in your video editing software. But do NOT think fixing it later can just fix everything. Take the time to get it right while you are filming.
Deep: have a deep background behind your subjects. Don’t film actors against a flat wall if you can avoid it. Watch movies. Rarely is a couch against a wall. They’re often like 15 feet in front of the wall, so when the actors are sitting on it, there’s deep out of focus fun behind them.
But isn't having a bunch of details in the background istracting? Not if they're out of focus and round and blurry, which brings the focus right to your subject while giving a rich, painterly palette of colors and ideas behind them. It creates an impressionistic Monet painting behind your subject, adding richness. The background behind them can probably have ANY level of detail you want, provided it's sufficiently out of focus. Having said that, geometric patterns can be distracting. like lines or grids and whatnot. Steer clear until you know how to use those well.
Wide: Hollywood movies rarely use extreme close ups. I’m convinced a part of why Spielberg made it so big is that he films 3 or 4 differently angled extreme wide shots of each action scene, meaning your brain understands the geography and relations of characters and objects. Filming on a tiny lcd screen, there’s a tendancy to get close and zoom in on faces before filming, so you can see the details on that tiny lcd screen. But watch Hollywood movies and understand that closeups are more rare, for emotional shots, and are often surrounded by wider shots to show the action of the scene.
Shallow: This is cheap, but if in doubt, make your focus shallow, meaning the background is that pretty blurry round “bokeh” that looks so creamy and delicious. Instant beauty, but don’t do it if it’s distracting. In Hollywood movies, there’s often a lot of light, meaning big round creamy out of focus areas are smaller. The less light you have, the more you need to open your iris, and the blurrier the out of focus areas will be. the movie Crash has a lot of outdoor night scenes in cities. Which means 1) low light, open iris, blurry background, and 2) pretty blurry car and street lights. Looks great. Learn how to control this, then back it off when necessary. Modern digital cameras work better in darkness than older cameras did, meaning dark scenes and big bokeh are more common now. It CAN be overdone, but I wouldn’t worry about overdoing it starting out. round blurry backgrounds give a great cheap wow factor to an average audience, especially if they know you’re indie.
Alive: put green plants and people and moving cars in your backgrounds, out of focus, moving around. This stuff is not super distracting because it’s out of focus, creating that smooth palette of background “world”ness. again it’s cheap, but it makes the world feel more real and delicious. People feel good when they see green plants. If in doubt, add plants, unless you are specifically going for an unfriendly environment.
Smooth: this is preference, but shaky is easy, and smooth is challenging, so aim for smooth. get smooth footage and avoid shaky cam. people are sometimes lazy and then call it style. learn how to get smooth imagery, then choose whether you want shaky cam footage or not, when it works. sometimes shaky cam is appropriate (I personally can’t stand it). but shaky cam should NOT be your default. it’s not Hollywood’s default unless it’s michael bay,m and some have said “to make a transformer movie, get a ball of metal, roll it down a hill, zoom in on it, and shake the camera around”. it’s a cheap way of imitating intensity in action scenes. in my opinion, it’s better to have a still image on a tripod than a shaky moving one. in my opinion, here is the scale of ideal shots. shaky > tripod >steadicam/dolly/crane. to me, smooth and moving is the ideal, but the movement should suit what you’re doing so it’s not distracting. (metal ball, quantum bed shot, gandalf sees ring shot, campus pan down shot).
As far as story and script go..uh.
I make films to capture a social ecosystem and share it and immerse myself in it. I make films to satisfy fantasies, and to vent frustrations, and to help others understand me and maybe be enriched by my perspective as I have been by those of others. I make films to exists in moments I wish I could go back to or have mastery over. For me it’s about capturing the world as I see it, in little rain drops I can share with others.
The alien screenwriter said something like “I don’t follow the three act structure, per se. I just make sure something interesting is always happening.” For me making a feature, I think of a story i want/need to tell about a character. then I think of like 8 more, and I weave them together since each one is like 10 minutes long on its own. I’m working on an exact formula of my own for writing scenes (setups, payoffs, 3 goals per scene, conflicting character goals each scene, micro arcs, macro arcs, and the big arc, etc.) but keep in mind that every useful formula exists because someone made it up and tried it, and it worked. there could be formulas out there no one has come up with yet.
Sound: get your microphone as close to your actor as you can without it being in the shot. (actually if it’s a still shot, and the mic is also still, you could potentially put it in the shot in the corner then get a shot without it, and layer that empty area on top in editing, removing the mic but keeping the crisp sound.) make your microphone as loud as possible without it clipping. if you can record in steror, meaning two channels, make one louder and one quieter so you can blend both when needed to avoid clipping and whispering.
Someone needs to have headphones to monitor as you’re filming.
I tried recording scripted scenes with three cameras at once (two actor closeups, a wide shot) to making filming quicker, but I ended up moving my body from camera to camera to focus on each actor anyway so i could monitor actors’ performances and focus on each actor as needed. So now I only use 1 camera because all I was doing was filming triple the amount of non-useful takes.
Longer answer:
I’ve made films since I was 6 and went to college for tv studio production, and I made a live-action feature in college to learn the process. That was a decade ago, but there’s a rough draft of the film on youtube, and I’ll provide a link if I remember. I have a whole breakdown of what I learned from it, somewhere.
There are technical skills (how to record image and sound), management skills (how to organize, manage, and progress a project with people who are helping), social skills (how to observe, reflect, communicate, and improve), and marketing skills (how to get your projects seen) that need to be learned by you. Trying things yourself, and helping other people and observing how they do those things, are great ways to learn how to do things better.
It depends on what your goals are. There are some networking and marketing skills that are more essential and challenging if you’re trying to, say, start a career in Hollywood or LA (which is apparently ruthless and SUPER competitive), that aren’t as central if you’re trying to become a youtuber or just make films for fun with friends.
If you’re getting started, there are a few principles to keep in mind.
1) having really expensive equipment will NOT make up for not creating entertaining content. pretty images and clear sound are a BASELINE, not a product. (Incidentally, create a bunch of pretty images with good sound and slap music on it, and you have a decent music video.) A good filmmaker can make something entertaining and/or informative with three hundred dollars worth of equipment, and yet I hear youtubers sometimes say “I’m starting out, and I need $5,000 worth of equipment to succeed.” That’s a red flag when someone says that, that they are lazy. No, you don’t. You can get a LOT out of cheap equipment if you know how to use it. Make good content with $200 worth of equipment, then move on up. Phones can shoot higher quality video than the really expensive cameras I had in college 10 years ago.
2) sound quality is more important than video quality. Our brains can often tolerate lower quality imagery if the sound is clear. Still not ideal, people often neglect audio, which I think makes up MORE than 50% of the experience in the viewer’s head.
3) as the person in charge of a film shoot, you are the leader and captain. You are the host of the party. This means it’s your job to be firm, clear, patient, and understanding with those you’re in charge of. ESPECIALLY if they’re helping you for free. It is your job to solve problems without freaking out. If you stay calm and in control (even if your freaking out on the inside) that will help everyone else, who looks to you to get an idea for how to react to things. Everything will go wrong, so expect that and be prepared to modify things and simplify thing if needed, on the fly. The more you plan and execute this stuff, the better you’ll get at preventing things from going wrong. Which is why you won’t want to spend 100,000 on your first movie, which you’ll screw up. This is part of the fun and the learning. Try your best to create positive vibes while being encouraging to others who are helping you, while also being firm about what you can expect.
4) the more you do all the jobs yourself, the better you’ll get at explaining and communicating them to your subordinates, and the better you’ll get at having reasonable expectations.
5) If someone misunderstands you, it’s YOUR fault. Either you weren’t clear, or you misjudged their ability to understand you. There’s no such thing as a complicated idea, only complicated explanations.
6) it’s your job to keep the train running on time. learn how to read the room, social cues, and body language, and know when to joke and goof, and when to focus everyone on the job at hand.
7) look up film clubs and indie film shoots, befriend other filmmakers, and offer to help on their projects. by observing and helping on sets—no-budget or million dollars sets, or anything in between, you can learn how to do things well AND avoid bad behaviors in your own projects. also, if you help others, they’ll be more likely to help you.
8) learn to detect in yourself when you have a passing interest in a project or idea, versus when you actually care and NEED to finish a project. learn the difference between “it would be cool to do this idea if it were easy and quick” and “this is something I need to do and finish.” If in doubt, take on projects that seem too small, and work upward in complexity.
9) be on time, and tell others about changes in the schedule as soon as possible. don’t make them hunt you down to figure out when a scene will be filmed, or if the project is still continuing.
10) don’t expect ANYONE to be more passionate and dedicated to your project than you are. if you can’t be bothered to be on time, communicate clearly, or plan things out, you can’t dare get mad at anyone else for taking the whole thing as a goofy joke. don’t go to people with skills and basically say “hey, can you please do all the work, and I’ll get all the credit?” learn every skill on your set, and prepare for having to do all those jobs yourself if needed. if you can’t handle that, you’ve bitten off more than you are passionate enough to chew. If you make a shooting schedule, prop lists, etc. these are like wearing a tie to a job interview; symbols that show others you plan on actually completing this project and in a timely and reasonable and realistic fashion.
11) reflect and figure out WHY you want to make any given project, because that is a BIG indicator of whether or not you’ll have the stamina and passion to actually finish it. I made up something called WIBFI/ICDTB/ICDT. “Wouldn’t it be fun/funny if….” / “I could do that better” / “I could do that”. For me, if any of those are the reason i’m embarking on this project, I’d better be able to finish it in a day, or I’ll run out of passion for it and leave it unfinished. For me, what works, is “If I don’t do this project and share this idea with the world, I’ll never be able to relax and feel happy.” Incidentally, if this can coincide with “unless I do something, I’ll be homeless soon” it’s also a great motivator.
Also, read my satirical kickstarter I made a few years back and think about the attitudes presented there and where you stand on them. It’s a collection of every attitude I’ve encountered in low budget indie filmmakers from my region.
Making YouTube Videos to Raise My Self-Esteem (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1772084716/making-youtube-videos-to-raise-my-self-esteem)
Also my primer on film acting and how it differs from theatre acting, etc.