Shooting on Film VS Video
For many somewhat older film-making veterans, their first experiences in production were with fully manual cameras. Some may regard such cameras as dinosaurs, but the pictures taken with these cameras could be truly impressive. Operating these manual film cameras enabled users to pick-up how to use depth of field and how to push and pull focus. These are terms you should take note of and study well. Using a manual lens let them discover just what one can do with a camera. Older filmmakers may now use very expensive digital cameras, but have roots in shooting in film.
We have grown accustomed to the sharpness of digital images and may find film to be hazy and lacking focus. Film can create amazing shadows, especially in black and white but the cost of film and processing is absolutely impossible for a movie-maker just starting out to get a film completed. If you have the luxury of using film you may play around with it but eventually it will be transferred to digital for the purpose of editing images and sound.
Shooting with film or video, each have their respective merits. In the end the project will dictate which you will use. In the past film school students sometimes shot with those funky little Super 8 cameras on black and white reversal film. Essentially it was like filming to a positive in lieu of a negative. The quality was bad and the lighting was a challenge, but they often managed to shoot decent abstract film journals. For example, Canadian filmmaker James E. Taylor once won an award for the purpose of a rock video shot on Super 8 film.
The processing was awfully pricey, but the anticipation of getting footage back inspired greater excitement than seeing footage shot on hi-def videos film students usually do nowadays. In the past, filmmakers used funky little viewing box with a hand crank and constructed lists in forums they wanted their cuts in the celluloid, and wrote them down and hung them up in the order that they were going to edit them in. The next thing you would do is splice the pieces together with tape. Then you would put the splice with the tape on it, in a small machine that that punches neat holes in the splice where the holes are on the side of their film.
Editing real film, ie celluloid, was a great experience and with significantly value, but it so much easier to just shoot and edit in digital. Plenty of die-hard film aficionados often plainly called got tired of all the money shooting with film cost, when filming digital formats is so immediate. There a good selection of not-so-expensive video cameras on the market that you can use when you start filming.
