[MacDV] Re: DV vs. Film

[Richard Brown]

> Going to another magazine - RES.  I was curious about the movie "The
> Anniversary Party" by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cummings which was
> created on DV. In RES magazine, vol. 4, no. 3, Alan Cummings said,
> "Sometimes digital video is quite unforgiving. It gets very close, but 
> it
> feels different because people don't look as pretty as they would on 
> film
> and we think that means that people are much more open and real.  But 
> that
> doesn't affect the performance at all - that's just the quality of DV."
>
> "The decision to use digital video was a very practical one that had 
> to do
> with speed - we had only 19 days to shoot the film and with digital 
> video,
> you can move faster.  It was a convenience, really.  We tried as hard 
> as we
> could to disguise the fact that we shot on DV in the finished film - 
> it's
> still an intensely ugly medium."

As I recall, "Anniversary Party" was shot in 24P High Def using 
something like the Cinealta by Sony. While it is DV, it is DV intended 
to be transferred to 35mm for release. The D.P. here is discussing 
problems with high definition video. There are a lot of issues in 
getting video to look "film-ish," but once again, independent film 
boils down to other factors, even after you've gone to extremes to make 
great looking video, or even if you shot 35mm. Even film festival 
winners can languish without star talent when it comes to theatrical 
potential. As I previously mentioned, the thinking towards 
distribution, when originating in sub-High Def DV (DVCAM and MiniDV, 
24P or not) might be best served as direct to DVD, with as many bells 
and whistles to make it interesting to avid film fans. This of course, 
would be the ticket AFTER exhausting the possibility of general 
release. The problem there, again, is cost. I could see the transfer to 
35mm eclipsing many a microbudget feature's ENTIRE budget. The saving 
grace may end up being DVD. The first few million adopters of DVD, and 
many more since, are potentially the type of home theater enthusiasts 
to enable this sort of niche film marketing. It would then boil down to 
avoiding stratospheric break even points, proper marketing, and making 
sales channels as liquid and service oriented as possible.

Richard Brown