High definition, low budget

I have High Definition on the brain lately.

There's little question that at some point HD is going to be as affordable and accessible to independent filmmakers as DV is right now. It's just a matter of when. And the move from DV to HD is no small deal, so to speak. This graphic illustrates the leap indie filmmakers are going to make:

When they're shot well by someone like Ellen Kuras, DV movies can look pretty good on home video. The Kuras-shot Personal Velocity actually fooled me into thinking it was film when I watched it on DVD. However, when DV movies are blown up and shown on large screens in theaters, they just look crappy. The audience reacts to the image from the first frame and places it in the "less than professional" category.

A low-budget DV filmmaker can script, perform, light, record and cut just as well as a high-budget filmmaker, and still...DV is DV. It looks like DV. Plenty of audience members are open to to this experience--a tiny few, mostly wishful indie filmmakers, even fetishize it--but plenty more simply don't consider a movie that looks the way DV does to be a "real" movie. This resistance is a psychological barrier that blocks the low-budget filmmaker's access to a large percentage of the moviegoing audience, but it's a barrier that will be significantly broken down once we get our hands on HD.

HD won't solve all of our problems, but it will go a long way toward solving the image-quality-related ones. Mark Cuban, who bought the Landmark Theatres chain, envisions a day when "You could shoot your film on digital, dump it on a hard drive, edit it on a laptop, send us that file, and 20 minutes later we could show it in a theater." Shot in HD and projected in HD, that movie will look to the audience a lot more like a "real" film than DV movies do today.

Last year at the National Association of Broadcasters convention, JVC introduced "the world's first consumer high-definition digital video camera," the GR-HD1. The street price for the camera is about $2400. Unfortunately, there's a lot not to like about the camera--it has only one chip, it compresses the video in MPEG2, it doesn't appear to cooperate well with Final Cut Pro.

But NAB 2004 is coming up. NAB is where camera manufacturers like to make their big announcements. Their R&D departments have had a year to advance the "affordable HD" category. A 3-chip camera with decent specs that works well with Final Cut Pro could be a milestone event.

I attended NAB 1999, and it changed my filmmaking career. I came out of it convinced that with a Mac, a DV camera and the just-announced Final Cut Pro 1, I could do in my apartment what I'd previously been paying thousands for in rental and the hiring of specialists. I took the gamble, and out of it came "Split Screen" segments, lots of fun side projects and, oh yeah, Nothing So Strange, a movie that could not have been made without the flexibility that comes with ownership of production tools.

In fact, Nothing So Strange would probably not even have been conceived if I hadn't been riding on the DV bandwagon. Once you own the tools and can shoot or edit literally at any time of the day or night, with zero preparation or coordination, you simply look at filmmaking in a new way. The idea of what is possible expands beyond what used to be possible if you a) Got the money, b) Arranged a schedule, c) Got everyone together at the appointed time, et cetera. Conventional film production is an activity dominated by problem-solving. So the freedom to conceive an idea and start shooting and cutting it instantly--sometimes without so much as a phone call to get the ball rolling--transforms the filmmaking process. Producing a scene becomes less about solving logistical problems and more about, well, producing a scene.

It's addictive. I'm really not interested in making films any other way. And once HD can fit into this process, there will be one less reason even to think about it.

UPDATE: Just found a great (very techie) blog called HD for Indies by Mike Curtis. Boy, does this guy know a lot. Plus, especially in the early entries, he expresses many of the same ideas as I express above about what HD could mean for independent filmmakers.