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Want to Shoot on 35mm and Save Money? Here’s How!
By Frey | May 22, 2007
I’m going to save you $15 dollars right now. How? Don’t buy one of those “How to make a feature film for under $X,000″ books. Why? Because they’re usually full of nonsense. The two books I do recommend are Robert Rodriguez’s book, Rebel Without A Crew and Stu Maschwitz’s recently released The DV REBEL’S GUIDE: An ALL-DIGITAL Approach to Making KILLER ACTION MOVIES on the CHEAP. But that’s not what you came here for, you came here because you want to save money shooting 35mm - and neither really talks about shooting 35mm, so here we go:
Do you truly know why you want to shoot on 35mm? I mean really, is your reason “extremely high quality”? How about you want latitude? Maybe you want the archival quality of film? Or is your reason more selfish: you want people to go “ooohh, aaahhhh” when you show them your DVD and claim, “This was shot on 35mm film!” Either way, it’s all cool, but 35mm is very expensive and you need to know some ways around spending a bazillion dollars on your film.
So, if you want to save money, but still have a 35mm image worth looking at, I’ll give you a few good tips (note: you’ll want to get a pen and paper and write this down!):
1) Buy a Konvas and use Lomos. Want 2.39:1? Get an anamorphic Lomo lens. Konvas and Lomo lenses (even anamorphic lomos) are selling for decent prices on ebay.
2) Buy shortends/recans - the fresher your film is, the better your picture. Buy from a reputable shortend dealer.
3) Find a good lab; one that actually cleans their processing tank from time to time. If it costs a few dollars extra, a good lab is still 1000 times better than a cheap lab that doesn’t care when they clean their tanks. Spending extra money up front here will save you a load of money trying to clean things up later.
4) Find a respectable post facility that does High Definition or greater (2k/4k), and look at their images and compare them to other post houses before sending them your film. You’ll want to shop around, but know what you can afford before going with the most expensive people around…
5) Whether you’re doing a positive print or transferring to a digital format, you’ll want to pay the extra cash to sit in with the colorist. Your finished image will be what YOU want - not what some hungover colorist decided he liked between sips of coffee. The colorists are human and not mind-readers, so it’s always best if you are sitting in the room with them.
6) Get a decent computer with plenty of processor and plenty of RAM. Do your homework and know what NLE you’re going to use, and what computer specs it needs. For instance, if you’d like to run Final Cut Pro, you CAN’T run it on a Dell. Avid now runs on Intel Macs, so no worries there. You may even be happy getting Adobe Production CS3 when it’s released - it will also run on both Mac and PC. Want a free NLE? Then you may try the one that comes with your Operating System (Microsoft’s Movie Maker or Apple’s iMovie HD) or maybe even VirtualDub (I don’t believe VD does HD) - but you will find them all extremely limited on features. Under Linux, try Jahshaka, Kino, and/or Cinelerra, but the codecs on Linux are limited, so your results may vary (btw: we’ve been running our own version of Linux designed for editing called CHAINSAWLINUX for a while here at the ranch, but it hasn’t been released to the public yet - stay tuned though). Just make sure you understand all system requirements before making the plunge, or else it will cost you a whole lot more than you anticipated.
7) For a fast AND redundant workflow, setup your system with RAID 50 - if you don’t know what that is, then look it up (hint: you’ll want to buy at least six to eight of the same model/brand 750Gb SATA drives and a SATA card that does RAID 50 in hardware. With six 750Gb drives, you’ll get about 3 Terabytes of storage - the more drives, the better).
The good thing about all of this is that if you want to cut corners with any of the above, you can! The downside is that your picture will suffer every time you cut a corner. Also know that you won’t be able to do anything without a budget. So start budgeting today…
Also, note that I purposefully didn’t cover sound. Sound is a completely separate issue, and one that will need to be discussed at a later date… Keep an eye out for that discussion!
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Topics: Post Production, film |
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