Our First Class

Our first class was both heartening and disheartening.  We found out that we only have to shoot an hour of tape at the most and that our final documentary will likely be between five and eight minutes.  Totally doable.  But, my idea for the doc, about which I'm getting more and more excited and having a ton of ideas, is going to be challenging because it requires shooting on location in San Francisco.  Shooting in San Francisco requires a permit and that can be expensive.  So I'll have to think about that and consider getting a permit, or using a stripped down crew (normally there will be five or six people shooting the footage ~ lighting, camera, sound, clapboard, etc).  All of my ideas involve shooting outside.  And why not take advantage of the fact that I live in such a photographable place?

Last night we started to learn how to use the technology, getting a chance to muck around with the cameras and the tripods.  We're going to be using a Sony HVR-Z1U.  It's digital and stores the footage on video tape.  I'm finally learning about F-stops and aperture, which is how you control the amount of light in the shot.

I'm also enjoying learning the language of film.  Like the law, there is a whole new vocabulary.  I can already tell that the vocabulary of film is going to be a lot more colorful and fun than that of the law, with its high-falutin Latin and French phrases (res ipsa loquitur, voir dire).  Of course, in film, there are technical terms like chrominance and luminance.  But there are fun ones too: A "gag" is any kind of gimmick or trick that you work into a shot or a scene; it doesn't have to be funny.  And when you playback your first shot on the monitor, you do so to make sure everything "stuck," that it looked and sounded right.

To get in the right mindset, I am currently listening to the endlessly fascinating "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" audiobook, which a detailed account of the renaissance in American filmmaking that started with Bonnie & Clyde in 1967 and culminated in the memorable films of the 1970s by Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, and Robert Altman, and produced actors like Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman, and Dustin Hoffman.  The chapter about the making of Easy Rider was highly entertaining and has given me a lot of ideas about my project.  I highly recommend the book.  Now I have a burning desire to re-watch Apocalypse Now.....