The DV Rebel's Guide

Michael Flynn writes "The DV Rebel's Guide is broken down into chapters that follow the basic timeline of a film's production. The first chapter covering the overall philosophy of the authors approach and the rest focused on the making of your film: Pre-production, Production and Post production. A great deal of the book is focused, to very good effect, on post production." Read on for the rest of Michael's review The DV Rebel's Guide author Stu Maschwitz pages 320 publisher Peachpit Press rating 9 reviewer Michael Flynn ISBN 0321413644 summary A` step by step guide to making your own film Stu Maschwitz is one of the founders of The Orphanage. A visual effects house with credits in such films as Sin City, The Day After Tomorrow, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Prior to founding The Orphanage, Stu had a stint at ILM.

Stu's writing style is very easygoing and at times irreverent. Regarding his short film that he includes on the DVD, he points out "The Last Birthday Card was made on an Apple G3 and took over two days to render. I chose to take these enforced breaks from working on my film as opportunities to strike up a new hobby, one that I still practice today: staring at my After Effects progress bar".

In each chapter, a number of Hollywood action films is referenced. At the end of each chapter, the films that are mentioned are listed so that the reader can put them onto their NetFlix list or run over to the local video store and rent them to see first hand, the techniques that are referenced.

His pragmatic approach to getting the job done and using whatever tools are at hand or that you can build is highly effective. My only complaint is that there are a number of specifics regarding After Effects that are not covered in Stu's book. To his defense, this is not an After Effects tutorial. You are expected to know how to use AE before your dive into Stu's methods.

His suggestions for examining the area around you to utilize as much of what you have at hand is unique and effective. Suggesting the use of glass elevators for simulating crane master shots as well as people movers in airports for dolly shots is exemplary of the approach. Additionally, for the wood working inclined filmmaker, a very nice design is included for building a hand-holding rig for your DV camera (Stu eschews hand holding a DV camera due to the light weight that generally translates to a very shaky image).

The book details adding effects that Stu used in his short film "The Last Birthday Card". The film illustrates a number of useful techniques such as compositing a helicopter into a scene, practical bullet hits and squib simulations. He also includes high quality squib footage on the DVD for the rebel filmmaker to use in his/her own projects.

The last section of the book covers color correction in great detail. It provides techniques for using the color correction tools in After Effects as well as using a layered approach to this process. To illustrate the approaches that he suggests, he provides a number of After Effects projects on the DVD that the reader can use to follow along with the examples.

Stu also, wisely, includes one of the chapters of the book on the DVD in PDF format. This is the camera chapter. With DV cameras changing at such a rapid pace, this allowed him to provide very up to date information on DV cameras that might have been obsolete by the time the book had come back from the printer.

He provides a number of very nice scripts and presets on the DVD for a variety of effects as well as tools for color correcting. The film strip script that allows you to compare a number of shots at once for color/look management is particularly nice.

Finally,Stu maintains a lively message board devoted to the book where folks can ask questions and Stu is very prompt about providing answers. Having read over 200 books on film making, this book is the only one that will end up on the set of my next film.

You can purchase The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Re:Talent?

[AK Marc]

That hasn't been used in movies since the 50s.

$30 Film School

[markbt73]

Another great reference, if you're interested, is $30 Film School by Michael Dean. I bought it a couple years ago when I was going to make a short film (I still am; it's just on the back-burner right now).

This is the best way I can think of to stick it to the MPAA, though: Go make your OWN movie! You won't make any money, but DIY stuff always makes you feel good.

Re:Sounds like a good book

[HungWeiLo]

Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi, later quasi-remade into Desperado, with a budget of only $6,000. He did everything from selling his own blood for fundraising to casting his own family members in the movie.

On the El Mariachi DVD, there was a special feature called something like "The 10-minute film school of Robert Rodriguez". It probably talks about some of the stuff in his book, like how not to waste film. For example, if somebody throws a gun up to a balcony, but misses the balcony - don't throw the film away. Just cut the part after the gun misses the balcony and paste other footage which shows the gun landing on the balcony. Hollywood would have just scrapped the whole day's take and reshot the whole scene and what a waste that is. This is why old-school Hong Kong films like Hard Boiled can have more explosions and action than Die Hard, but only costing $4 million US to make.

Yes. It's worth it anyway.

[voidstin]

The book is really a-z from acquisition to delivery. If you're looking to shoot on prosumer cameras and edit on prosumer gear, there's something in here for you.

If you're not using After effects, what are you using? The book concentrates on getting professional level finishing and effects out of prosumer level tools. Basically, with the finishing chapter, he's showing you how to replace a Smoke with AE and some elbow grease. If you're using something higher end (Flame/Nitris/Nuke/etc), it probably got stuff you already know how to do in your app, but you'll pick up some handy tips and the book may still be worth picking up.

The scripts alone are worth the price of the book. The color correction thumbnail script is genius.

I'd also look at Colorista - his GPU assisted color correction plugin that evolved out of one of the included scripts. Also super cool.

Re:Sounds like a good book

[gobbo]

On the El Mariachi DVD, there was a special feature called something like "The 10-minute film school of Robert Rodriguez". It probably talks about some of the stuff in his book, like how not to waste film.

I regularly show this to my students before they undertake a week of guerilla-style indie videomaking. It's a review of some raw footage from El Mariachi analysing how he pulled it off. It's full of tricks that translate from 16mm to DV, because they're about being cheap, cheap, cheap. As he puts it, "once you start that money hose flowing, it's hard to shut it off." The main thing is to be able to shoot with the edit in mind: the same scene from multiple angles to make it look like you have more cameras; vary framing and zoom during cut-away moments to keep the actors on a roll; be clever about props so you can edit for realism; mic placement is more important than equipment quality; minimize the need for ADR and foley (or, conversley, use them instead of expensive field recording); use a wide lens instead of steadicam; shoot in sequence when possible.

Those are all good tips, but the main thing to making an indie flick despite a tiny budget? Story. Story story story. Most indie films suck, but if it's a well-edited moving story, nearly everything else is forgiven.

Re:Talent?

[iSeal]

Were's the chapter on "talent"?

There's talk about directing actors in general (with the author recommending "Directing Actors" by Judith Weston), but face it - if you're a DV Rebel (low-budget-indy-filmmaker), you don't really have the funds whereby a chapter on this would be relevant. Your talent consists of a roster of friends, theatre/filmschool buddies, and family.

I own this book, bought it a weeks ago after listening to an interview with the author. Frankly, what a great purchase. It's one of the best titles I've ever read on the subject. You can catch the interview with the book's author here.

The author even packed in a great extra chapter on cameras in the DVD. To say that this book is simply about making cheap action movies is a misnomer. It's really about how to make good looking products on a skin-tight budget, regardless of content. There's talk about color correction, 24p vs. 60i, tricks for shooting in public, etc. Wonderful, wonderful book.

Re:Speaking of DV

[daverabbitz]

I can't see HDMI ever replacing 1394, as they are two completely different technologies for completely different purposes.

HDMI is a lossy (loss tolerant?) uncompressed digital transmission system for consumer displays with no error correction and no clock synchronisation, from which it would be quite difficult to reconstruct the exact same frame as was transmitted, it also (AFAIK) has no form of time-code or playback control system.

IEEE-1394 is a multi-peer bus architecture, which supports lossless transmission of framed data, with tight latency constraints. On of the useful protocols supported by IEEE-1394 is DV-1394 which allows a verbatim DV encoded AV stream to be transferred, frame-synchronised, between compatible devices and with AVC can also provide integrated seek control and TC's. It is also ubiquitous on high end workstations and is available on almost all prosumer and professional video cameras as well as digital cinema camera's (though 1394a doesn't possess the bandwidth for transferring DC in real-time).

To suggest that 1394 will be replaced by HDMI is like suggesting 20 years ago that YC video will be phased out because most (consumer) TV's only have composite or RF.

If it wasn't for the enormous installed base I might accept the notion that DV1394 would be replaced by HD-SDI, but to suggest that it would be replaced by HDMI is ludicrous. I have noticed a trend in that a lot of new pro camera's are including GigE, especially the ones using random access media (XDCAM, others).

I'd also like to note that I haven't seen any editing equipment or computer video grabbers which will accept an HDMI input, as opposed to the countless systems supporting both HD-SDI and 1394.