You Down with My DP?

I've gone from updating every two days to going almost two weeks without an update. I've recently just moved from small town Arkansas to big city Florida. I sort of got a rythem now, so I don't predict any shortage of updates happening to you guys anytime soon.

Anyway, I thought I'd go over getting a DP on your low to no budget today and how I went about it.

Last time I'd brought up that I'd made the revelation that having a well lit movie with production value was a good thing to have. I'm just brilliant aren't I?

I got on craigslist, dvxuser, backstage, and a few others I don't remember. Craigslist was by far the best.

I got some offers by some guys that had made some decent music videos or shorts, and some creepy guys that shoot micro machines roaming through their bedroom on some sort of flash freeze thing and wanted to move in with me. That's not that weird for Craigslist though.

I got some good offers but I haggled them to get a price I could actually work with. You got to do this. They need the credit and reel as much as they need the money, so you're the one in control. If they give you a hard time about how much money they want, just remind them of your budget and ask them if they'd rather sit on their ass for a week re-cutting their demo reel for the 18th time, or get paid DP'ing a movie. Well, you might want to paraphrase that a bit, but you get the point.

I finally got a great offer by a guy that not only had experience DP'ing an actual feature film, and it looked great. He understood the budget, asked for the least amount of money, and had family that lived near me. No paying for lodging!

The only thing for debate was the fact that one of the other guys had a Red One which is the best digital camera known to man...or at least to me. That stupid movie Jumper was shot with one.

But the guy wanted more, money, needed extra money to get his Red One shipped from storage, and he's not exactly awesome at lighting. Which is kind of like a director that doesn't work well with actors. David O. Russell?

Also, with the fact that I'm working with non-pro's, I'd rather work with a more non-obtrusive camera so as not to distract the actors from their naturalness anymore than the boompole would be doing. Which was how John Carney worked with his non pro's in Once.

Plus the camera would be beast as far as setting up goes. As apposed to my DVX which would take no time to set up and would let the cast and crew move quick and let us shoot in a week.

But, I've always heard if you're gonna do it...Do it Big!

I've never done this before, though. Do I want to pay more money than I have for a better looking movie that may make everything else suffer.

Kevin Smith shot his first on 16mm, so did all the other indie forfathers. So I can at least shoot on a digital camera.

So who did I choose?

I'll leave the suspense till next blog. And don't worry, I'll only make you wait a couple of days.