1200fps at Micro-Budget Prices

Just three weeks ago I was having a conversation with James McAleer, our resident expert on cinematography, where I was predicting the evolution of HD technology into high spec SLR stills cameras… and guess what, it’s already happened and in a way that’s both astounding and affordable. That’s how cool we are at $1000, we can often predict stuff that’s already happened! LOL

Basically, Casio have just released a $900 35mm SLR, the Casio Exilim Pro EX-F1, which will shoot short bursts of JPEG images at 60fps… and MPEG4 HD at 1200fps… no, I didn’t mistype that, they really do have an off the shelf camera that will shoot a genuine ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED FRAMES PER SECOND! Yikes! Read the story »

3 Common Film Script Errors

There is a common belief in the wider film community that micro-budget films will automatically have bad scripts. The thinking behind this is that a film is only being made on a micro-budget because it couldn’t attract “real” funding or a “real” producer. This attitude is actually bullshit because there are a thousand good reasons for making and controlling your film instead of putting energy into chasing funding… some of which we’ve talked about before, so let’s take that as a given.

However, across the scene there is some truth in the belief that micro-budget films have bad scripts… simply because far too many micro-budget film makers see self production as a method to green-light scripts that aren’t good enough to survive in the market.

However, there doesn’t have to be a link between micro-budget and bad scripts… at the end of the day it’s our decision… we can either stroke our own egos and make bad films or we can start taking both ourselves and micro-budget seriously and sharpen our scripts. Read the story »

Four New Articles

As I’m away for my first real holiday this year and have promised that the laptop is staying at home, here are a weeks worth of articles:

A rant from me about the stupidity of the “Hollywood” system for finding new writing talent.

A piece from the Unknown Screenwriter about his early days as a micro-budget film maker.

Another great piece from Cole about the DIY Mindset

and finally, a free gift from Digital Heaven… a hard drive space calculator

Now it’s up to you whether you read them all at once or pace yourself… but either way, have fun… now, where is that inflatable beach ball and my copy of Delueze’s Cinema 2

Clive

A Diamond In The Rough… by Unk

By Unknown Screenwriter

Thanks to Clive for asking me to come on board the 1000DollarFilm.com crew. Not many people know that I actually come from a micro-budget film background. Did I say micro-budget?

Scratch that. What’s lower than micro-budget? Hmmm. No budget? Whatever I could scrape up? Read the story »

Laziness, Greed and Stupidity Will Destroy Hollywood

So, apart from being a damn fine title for a movie, what the heck am I ranting about today?

Well, it’s occurred to me for a long time that there is something slightly odd about two of the facts I know to be true within the movie industry:

1) There is a worldwide shortage of great scripts

2) There are hundreds of thousands of wannabe script writers out there writing

Now, I know from experience that a lot of un-produced screenwriters actually don’t have the ability or the knowledge to create a workable script… so, there sure are a lot of really bad scripts out there.

And yet, they can’t all stink… there must be some good scripts out there, and if that’s the case why aren’t they being discovered? As you can imagine I’ve got some ideas about that… Read the story »

The DIY Mindset

by Cole McDonald

OK… So I’ve written three articles and not a single mention of building your own DIY dolly, crane, 35mm adaptor or goofy car mount. I was brought on board by our glorious editor Clive to be the DIY guy, but haven’t been posting any of the typical DIY guy things. That’s because there are already a ton of these resources out there (and we’ll get to those).

When coming up with where to go with this column, my first priority was to find a part of the DIY universe that hasn’t been explored as much as the obvious topics. It occurred to me that why DIY people make their own things, even though they’ve been made before and are widely available, is a lesser understood phenomenon. I came to this conclusion while posting to one of the filmmaking forums I frequent. Read the story »