You want examples? Mark Pirro shot a film for $800 that was screened at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Jeff Krulik has created dozens of documentaries while working a day job. And 17-year old Stephanie Aldridge has made three feature films in between high school classes.
The emergence of digital video has been a huge boon to these and other independent filmmakers. Shooting and editing digital video is easier, faster, and a whole lot cheaper than shooting with film. Not only that, but the quality of images shot on video tends to be much higher than those shot on film like Super-8, an inexpensive and inferior film stock that many independent filmmakers formerly used.
You can buy 1-hour MiniDV tapes in bulk for about $5 each. Buying and processing 1 hour of 16mm film, on the other hand, can cost you $1200. In the days before digital video, low-budget directors would have to rent a camera for each project because movie cameras were far too expensive to buy. And when it came time to edit, they had to rent time on a flatbed editor and learn the intricacies of syncing the sound effects, music, and dialogue.
A professional-quality video camera, on the other hand, costs just $2000 to $3000, and the editing can be done on any modern computer with a thousand bucks' worth of software. The bottom line: You no longer have to mortgage your home and max out your credit cards just to make a movie.
And even if your video equipment isn't professional, it probably packs almost as much power. A relatively new sub-$1000 DV camcorder can produce home movies from a wedding or a family trip with high-quality images and decent sound.
Even Hollywood is jumping on the DV bandwagon. Movies like Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones, Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, and The Anniversary Party (starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming) were shot on video.
For filmmakers like Pirro, Krulik, and Aldridge, the move to digital video has meant freedom to indulge their own idiosyncratic, sometimes wacky ideas for films. Krulik told the story of a Jewish World War II soldier who found Hitler's top hat. Aldridge makes vampire stories. And Pirro's latest flick is about a giant pair of buttocks that rampages through Los Angeles.
