PirateMyfilm: Making A High Quality Film On The Cheap With A Digital SLR

Posted on August 9, 2010 by maxkeiser| 2 Comments

Jim Harper (who, it should be noted, was the guy who invited me to that Cato event in the first place), reminds us of this with a blog post jokingly entitled How to Make a $200 Million Movie, but which actually shows how it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to make a film these days. More

PireatMyfilm ‘Crowd Funding For Pirates’

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2 Responses to PirateMyfilm: Making A High Quality Film On The Cheap With A Digital SLR

Fred's Family | August 10, 2010 at 1:30 am |

H264 looks nasty when you blow it up on the big screen.
Works for Docs or reality TV but the image is no where near Cinematic quality.

Of course if you are just watching on your computer then by all means go light the world on fire, if your world is a computer screen.
Dark Markets | August 9, 2010 at 6:08 pm |

The movie “Open Water,” filmed by an amateur crew on readily available (store bought) pro-consumer video cameras, has already achieved national tickets and sales status – $55 million in sales, on a $500,000 production budget (2004 dollars), with LionsGate buying the film and spending $8 million promoting it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Water_(film)
This was before HD quality made it into digitial video equipment, so today’s filmakers could undoubtably produce much better image quality… but even so, “Open Water” threw a perfectly good image on a good theater’s biggest screen.
The Star Wars 1999 “prequel” movie, “The Phantom Menace” made much use of CGI, computer generated imagery,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_I:_The_Phantom_Menace#Effects
according to some sources, as much as 1/3rd (33%!) of the movie’s CGI special affects were produced by an in-house team using stock (store bought, albeit “loaded”) Mac G5 tower computers & software…. with George Lucas & ILM not mentioning this sizable contribution in the movie’s final credits.

The great news is that computers and CGI software are now 2 or 3 generations improved since those 1999 G5 Macs… so even small but talented production crews can now produce fully “pro” special effects, much less a typical scene of actors and supporting cast.
More good news: People still want to see a good story, so as much as Hollywood producers, directors, and studios love to shove s*** on a screen,
(explosions, super-human stunts, special effects, etc.)
Michael Moore, “Open Water,” and other low-budget films prove that you can still win a sizable audience with a good story.

PS: and as to “overpriced actors,” one of the greatest female roles in film history – Gone With The Wind’s lead actress Scarlet O’Hara – was played by Vivian Leigh, who when she was chosen for the part, had ony 2 or 3 movie performances under her belt. She had developed her career in stage & theater, but her voice was not strong enough to project to large theaters…
so tomorrow’s super-star actresses & actors, may be lurking at a local stage production company near you today.