Directing Film Techniques and Aesthetics by Michael Rabiger

Chapter One Continued: Artistic Identity And Drama

• Cinematographers: someone whose profession is motion-picture photography.
• For Professional features 35mm is preferred camera medium but digital postproduction is now universal.
• 35mm is special but the digitising, editing and match-back process are expensive and complex for the beginner and are prone to irreversible mistakes.
• Shooting fiction on DV or HD video saves 20 to 35 percent of the time and slashes to near zero the huge budget mandated by film and its laboratory costs.
• Video allows the filmmaker in training shoot ample coverage and edit to the highest standards without regard for expense or compromise.
• Now that digital storage capacities are up and prices down, you can digitise a while production on your computer and edit to cinema quality in one process.
• Your work must reach audiences if you are to get recognition, two short films are more likely to get festival screening then one long one, so successful short films are you best calling cards.
• You must aim beyond the ordinary, good films invite us to dream, to exercise our judgement and to draw on our feelings and intuitions.
• During a feature film about 50-100 specialists carry forward their particular part of the communal task. Each will have begun as an apprentice in a lowly position and will have worked half a lifetime to earn a senior levels of responsibilities.
• Film is a business.
• You must go a different route and develop the elements of your production before you shoot it.
• Film skills come from emulating the professional system.
• The cinema's lifeblood comes from human feeling and intelligence.
• You should have a knowledge and love of film language and film history, a strong grasp of what drama is and how to use it and a drive to tell stories that comes from passionately held ideas about the human condition.
• You need to learn to express critical perceptions of the world around you.
• "indie": Independently finances and produced
• David Lynch: an American filmmaker and visual artist.
• Auteur: a filmmaker whose individual style and complete control over all elements of production give a film its personal and unique stamp.
• Death at the box office: means doing a humpty dumpty.