Mac, camera, action!

Following the lead of one of Hollywood’s biggest names, Ben Hammersley produces his debut film – on a laptop

Thursday September 5, 2002

The Guardian

It’s hard to resist the temptation to go old-school with the new toys. Steven Soderbergh certainly can’t. The award-winning film director habitually makes small art-house films between his big studio blockbusters. It’s a form of relaxation for the man whose last few – Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven and Erin Brockovich – have had the large casts, complex crews and expensive equipment expected from a Hollywood blockbuster. For his latest film, however, Soderbergh decided to try something different: shooting the whole thing on equipment you can buy in the high street.

The film, Full Frontal, now on release in the US, was shot on consumer-range MiniDV cameras, and edited with off-the-shelf editing software on a standard Apple Mac. It took only a few weeks, cost relatively little and, in the words of the producer, Scott Kramer, “was an opportunity to get back to the roots of why we all (cast and crew) became involved with movies”. Which is all very well, but surely raises an awkward question. If some fancy Hollywood director with years of experience and a cupboard full of awards can do it, can we? So, in the best Online tradition, we set out to do it.

First up: the gear. MiniDV cameras have been around for years. Most commercial camcorders use the format, recording the video digitally on to tapes a little smaller and fatter than an audio cassette. The cameras range in price, depending on the quality of the lenses, and the number of CCDs. CCDs, or charge-coupled devices, are the light sensors that actually take the pictures.

The more you have, the better the picture quality: cheaper cameras have one CCD, while the more professional use three. Canon lent us a three-CCD XL-1S, the same camera Soderbergh himself used in Full Frontal.

For our second camera, we used my three- year-old, now out-of production Panasonic camcorder. Even its single CCD, however, the picture quality is very good. With three, and good lighting, it’s better than celluloid. When Soderbergh came to transfer everything to film, he added artificial grain to give a less perfect look.

We were just glad ours was in focus. What these two cameras have in common, and the thing that makes digital film making all the easier, is the IEEE 1394 plug, which is the official standard name for a data-transfer technology created by Apple known more commonly as FireWire.

It allows data to be transferred to and from cameras at speeds of up to 400Mbps – fast enough to allow digital video to be played to, and recorded on, a modern computer. FireWire is an Apple trademark. Other manufacturers make compatible equipment, but often call it something else. IEEE 1394 is a bit of a mouthful, so look for such names as “iLink”, or “DV in”.

FireWire is not just for video cameras, either. Many portable hard drives use FireWire, as well as MP3 players, such as Apple’s iPod. Once you have your film on tape you can use the FireWire link to capture it. Depending on your machine, this is either very simple or quite tricky.

Soderbergh used an Apple G4 PowerMac, and we used my Apple PowerBook laptop. You are not restricted to Apple products, as many Windows machines – some from Sony, for example – come with FireWire, too. You can buy FireWire-compatible PCI cards to install in your machine if it does not have one already. But with Windows, you will need to install the correct drivers. Your editing package will most likely have capture software built in.

So, cameras in hand, and laptop gently warming in the study, we went out to make some art. This is not the forum for a breakdown of our filming expertise, and suffice to say that if you were in Kensington Gardens one sunny Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, and three dodgy-looking blokes came up to you with a camera, asking you to talk about

“Shirts and their place in modern society”, we are truly sorry, but your contribution to the genesis of Shirts! The Movie cannot be underestimated. With just 20 minutes of footage, we were already tired, my crew was grumpy and we decided to go and watch the cricket instead. Soderbergh, however, didn’t tire so easily. During the three weeks of production of Full Frontal, he shot more than 50 hours of footage.

This is another of the advantages of making a film in this way. Digital video is not only cheap to use, process, store and edit, but the cameras can roll for far longer than your average celluloid setup. For both the Hollywood master and the west London apprentice, this means a far higher chance of getting something worth watching. Which is what we did next. Getting the pictures from a camera on to a computer is called capturing, and used to be an arcane art, especially with analogue cameras and older, slower, hard drives.

Data from the camera would be coming at such a speed that the slow computer could not keep up, especially if it had to do the tricky analogue-digital conversion. Nowadays, the speed of the average hard drive, and working with digital info at source means the problems of dropped frames and dodgy sound are long-gone. Nevertheless, digital video takes up a great deal of space.

We got around this by using an Iomega portable hard drive to give additional storage.

There are many on the market, using either USB or FireWire as their connection. FireWire drives are very popular in the professional film-editing world, as they can send and receive data much faster than the USB 1.0 versions, which, when dealing with video, is all important.

With a FireWire setup, capturing the film is simple: you plug the camera in, and the computer takes control of it. You fast forward to the start of the section you require, and call that the “in-point”, and then spin on to the end of the section, and call it an “out-point”.

Hitting the magic button rewinds the tape and plays it, saving the section you have marked out as a file on your drive. Do this for every scene and you have a big directory of movie files to play with. Editing is a similar process, and works in basically the same way as all film-editing software.

We, in common with Soderbergh, used Final Cut Pro, Apple’s professional-grade editing package, which recently won an Emmy award for its services to the film industry, but Macs come with the simpler iMovie built in free. Windows machines have their own range, too, with Adobe Premiere being one of the more powerful.

Windows XP also comes with a free low-end editing package. Editing a film is basically a job of shuffling the scenes around, and digitally trimming bits out of them. Of course, within that phrase, I’ve just belittled years of film-making experience of a professional Final Cut Pro operator, or exaggerated the easy-as-pie home movie-making of iMovie, but you get the idea. A bit of experimentation, and you have a finished film.

We burnt ours on to a CD-RW, to watch as a VCD, and will be putting it on the web. Soderbergh transferred his film on to celluloid, and it will be opening in the UK later in the year. We won’t be making any money from Shirts! and, factoring in the beer I had to buy the crew, I actually made a loss.

Full Frontal, on the other hand, is already turning a profit. With the additional marketing and printing costs, Miramax, which distributes the film, needed to make $3m to break even.

Foreign rights sales doubled this immediately. It is perhaps this aspect that most pleases the movie studios. This brand of low- cost, high-art film-making now allows professionals and amateurs alike to make movies they could never have afforded, with a picture quality and ease-of-working never before available, and allows them to be profitable.

There’s a lot of talk about how new technology democratises everything, allowing ordinary people the tools to compete with the best, and this is no exception. This stuff allows for experimentation, and the breaking of new talent. Aspiring film-makers need only spend a few thousand pounds to have the gear necessary to compete for little risk. Despite the difficult subject and tricky script, we were never going to lose our shirts making Shirts!, and, because of that, we’re off to make another. Look out London: it’s time for Shirts! II.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,785874,00.html