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Feature: Page (1) of 2 - 02/16/07

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Zero-Budget Adventure in HDV

By Mike Jones

It was only afterwards that I came to realize the experience as everything movie-making is supposed to be? No budget, minimal equipment, a lack of resources, a difficult location and just a single 10 hour day to shoot a complete 12 minute short film?.! Big budgets, ample resources, lots of time ? these are not the conditions that really test your abilities or force you to think laterally and imaginatively. It?s only when parameters are really tight and you?re forced to think in new directions that great things are possible? All the large scale productions one can work won?t test our pure creative and technical  abilities more than having to work with nothing.

Of course this is all in hindsight; leading into the production it seemed like the world was conspiring against us?

The project ran with the title of ?TUESDAY? and was a short and quirky horror/suspense film about human clones. In the early stages it was assumed we were going to shoot standard definition widescreen DV. However I?d been working with HDV and reviewing the torrent of HDV products for both shooting and post-production and one thing becomes quickly certain; once you?ve had HD resolution in your viewfinder or on your edit system screen it?s very hard to look at standard definition again without disappointment. . . Once you?ve gone HD you never go back.

So. . .  a few well placed phone calls to Sony and they kindly agreed to loan us a 3CCD HDV FX1 camera for our immersive in-the-field test.

So far so good. . . But the luck couldn?t last. The first round of pressure to be applied came (as it always does on a video shoot with a budget so low you have dig for it) in the form of simply trying to get all parties, cast and crew, available to be in the same place at the same time. Further then to timing cast and crew availability with the availability of the location ? a small terrace house in an inner-suburb of Sydney. No easy task when you are, for the most part, relying on volunteers.

On set with the Sony HDV FX1.

Just when we thought we had it all sorted out a spanner was lobbed in our works with the news that the friends who lived in the house that was to be our location, and who had kindly agreed to vacate the premises for a few days for our shoot, where being evicted leaving an even smaller window of opportunity to schedule the shoot. Almost the entire film was set inside this dim, Victorian era house and, moreover, the script relies heavily on specific location of doors, hallways and lounge rooms; a spatial arrangement that would be difficult and time-consuming to re-adapt to a different location.

The result was not an abandoned project but rather a ?now or never? approach and the entire shoot condensed into a single day. Whilst the number of shots on the storyboard was fairly low with a manageable number of scene and lighting setups, the single day would not afford us time for multiple takes or complete coverage of a scene from every angle. These conditions of course making editing very difficult and I was soemwhat glad at this stage to only be behind the camera and not behind the edit desk.

But that was a problem for later; more immediately was the issue of lighting in the small and dim Victorian terrace house. One of the first traits of HDV that struck me when I began experimenting with and reviewing HDV cameras was how similar HDV was to film. Not in the look or ?feel? of the image (which has its own individual properties that make it quite distinct from both film and DV) but rather in the approach you have to take to shooting HDV that is much like film ? you simply have to be careful. HDV can be far less forgiving than DV. It?s much easier to mess up a shot in HDV by bad lighting and incorrect exposure. When the image has double the resolution of DV mistakes or poor exposure stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. On the flip-side, if you light carefully and understand the distinct properties of the format, HDV is an amazing and flexible format quite capable of images of astounding quality.

However that said, getting good lighting in a tiny, dim and cramped old house is no easy task. Our lighting kit was rudimentary to say the least - a standard set of three Redhead 650 watt lamps on stands; hardly a cinematographer's delight. The first issue I knew needed to be overcome was simply the level of light particularly in a movie that called for low-level mood lighting of suspense and danger.