If you go to shoot a film with an experienced crew and you pull out a DSLR camera you’re going to run into a significant issue. All the lenses used on professional cine cameras are PL mount and won’t fit on a DSLR.

And the lenses that do fit on a DSLR don’t have the features an experienced camera crew depends on. That has now changed and this video from Philip Bloom is proof of the value of PL lenses on a DSLR.

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Story telling with Film

March 5, 2010

Film making is story telling. Right?

So what’s more important – the film making or the story telling?

NPRs Scott Simon knows a thing or two about this subject and shares a few tips in this short video.

Learning to use the language of film to tell stories is one thing. But the basics of good story telling are about the story itself, not the media used to tell the story.

Scott Simon walks the talk in this video. It’s as important to watch what he does as much as listening to what he says. He’s using his own tips to tell the story… brilliant!

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DSLR HD Video Feature Comparison

March 3, 2010

Here’s another way of looking at all the Canon DSLR cameras – a brief feature chart comparing the four Canon DSLR cameras and the Panasonic Lumix GH1.

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HD Video Shoot-out – Canon T2i vs 7D

March 1, 2010

The release of the Canon Rebel T2i brings a high quality, inexpensive tool for independent film makers to the Canon DSLR camera lineup. At less than $800 for the camera body, it’s half the cost of a Canon 7D and seems to shoot HD video at the same quality.
The question is… how does the T2i [...]

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Video Production Budgeting – Part 3

February 26, 2010

This is the third part of the tutorial on video production budgeting. Actually, this is a bonus section. As I was creating the first two segments I kept thinking about what I’ve learned in the 35+ years I have in this industry.
And what kept coming up to me was the importance of a basic business [...]

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Video Production Budgeting – Part 2

February 24, 2010

This is the second part of the tutorial on video production budgeting. Actually, this part is about pricing. The first part was about figuring out what it would cost. Now you need to come up with how much to charge for the project.
And that is another story.

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Video Production Budgeting – Part 1

February 22, 2010

I keep seeing lots of questions in forums about how to price your video production services. That makes sense as professional photographers are a big segment of the market for DSLR cameras and there are many significant differences between the photography business and the videography business.
So, I’ve put together a three part tutorial on budgeting [...]

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HTML5 and The Video Element

February 19, 2010

As a film maker you may not care about coding web sites – unless you’re planning to distribute your film on the web. Oh, yeah – that’s pretty well everyone, right?
Vimeo.com and youtube.com both have HTML5 in beta. It’s time you learned something about what this means to you.
I’ll make this as simple as possible [...]

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Social Media for Photographers & Film Makers

February 17, 2010

Most business people believe social media is a waste of time. They thought the same thing about the web back in 1994 when I started building interactive marketing programs.
Well, the statistics tell the story and social media is becoming a vital plank in any marketing plan.
The problem is… you can’t  just pick up the phone [...]

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Amazing and, yes, it’s green screen

February 15, 2010

I wrote recently about the difficulties of producing good green screen work. This short film why green screen is sometimes necessary for producing amazing sequences.
Of course, it helps to have world-class 3D and compositing software and a team that knows how to use it.
I don’t know if I like the finished film or the “making [...]

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