Indie Filmmaking Resources

Alan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:42:51 +0000

I've been involved in some indie filmmaking over the last year or so and that's meant I've had to learn about activities that I would otherwise have missed out on. For instance, I'm comfortable with studio recording for music but not recording speech for a drama, similarly location recording has its own obstacles to overcome.

Here's a collection of articles and resources that I've used over the last year.

Books

Despite some of these books being a few years old, there's a wealth of information in there. All have a few pages missing, but in general you should be able to find something of use.

There's a book which is recommended on almost every online forum

Location Audio Simplified by Real World Audio

Forums

Sites and articles

Filmsound Audio Post FAQs

Actually the whole of Filmsound is worth a look at, not just the article above.

studiodaily.com

Apple Learning Interchange - Videography for Educators

Mediacollege.com

Sound, camera, makeup tips at DVUser

DIY

Make your own Steadicam

Make your own boom 1

Make your own boom 2

Lighting

Strobist is the place to check for learning about lighting. It used to be purely about still photography; the principles are all the same, just that you have to cope with motion in a different way for movies. With the article on Robert Rodriguez, Strobist is taking a long-awaited venture into aspects of cinematography as well.

If you look around on that site, you'll notice mention of decent powered DIY lights as suitable lightsources. We've been thinking of using some 10 million candlepower rechargeable torches so that there's no need for electrical mains on location. Add a couple of battery packs, or at the price of the torches, it may even be worth buying several times as many as you need in one go so that you can swap them over when the power runs out.

Then get a couple of stands. Jury-rig a way to hold them on, even bungee cords could work, better still would be reusable nylon cable ties. Add a couple of home-made diffusers and reflectors and you'd have a portable lighting system.

As for reflectors, a good thing to get is the reflective car windshield covers you can get for about £1.00 on most markets. The inner-side is often reflective silver. You may need to add some bracing, just depends what materials you've got to hand; UPVC pipe, short strips of wood, even a plastic ruler or bamboo cane could work.

Management/Production

Gantt Project is an open source software similar to Project. Could be very useful for letting everyone know what they need to do, by when and understand they're not available, etc.

Scriptwriting Tools

Project Central at Celtx has facilities for collaborative scriptwriting and peer-reviews

Editing Software

Ubuntu Studio

Cinelerra, etc

For some understanding of how these compare, have look at my experiences with the free software editing packages and specifically with Cinelerra.

Equipment
I'm sure this will cause discussions about what counts as indie, but I think this is the camera to have. I admit, I haven't worked with one, but from looking at the specifications, the Red One looks great. There are cheaper cameras out there, yet this one seems to be the one to aspire to.

Green Screen
An article on how-to-greenscreen using Final Cut Pro, but still useful whatever editing tool you're using.