MiniDV Archives - Budget-stretching tips for filmmaking, animation, motion graphics & visual effects

Using a car interior as an audio booth

If you need to record clean ADR or voiceover, etc, and don’t have access to an audio booth, try recording inside a car (that’s not running, duh)… I guess they’re actually designed to have great acoustics. The only problem is that the actor can’t stand up, which often makes a big difference in delivery, especially if it’s an untrained actor… so maybe just always use really really short actors, I dunno. I can’t remember where I got this tip from… either a book, website or an audio person.

As I’m writing this, I remember a related experience from before I had heard of that. There’s a scene with two actors exchanging dialogue in the back seat of a parked car, which I shot from the front seat with a Sony VX1000.

As we were setting up mics, I was astonished to realize that the audio from the camera’s built-in stereo mic actually sounded better… which is the first and only time that has ever happened. But I guess it makes sense– that sedan had nice acoustics and we were in the middle of a quiet wooded area. Also, they were moving around a lot and keeping a directional mic properly aimed at them within such an enclosed space would’ve been difficult.

You can also get one of these relatively inexpensive thingees… I have one and it works great, especially for the price.

No-budget inspiration: One Thousand Years, a narrative feature

There aren’t very many genuinely no-budget feature length films out there (as opposed to this term sometimes being used, ungenuinely in my opinion, in the industry to describe films made for less than $100,000). There especially aren’t very many that are good. As in, good enough to inspire. I know sometimes we can be inspired by seeing someone make a feature that turns out crappy, because it comforts us to truly feel like “I could probably make something better than that piece of garbage”. But that’s not really inspiration, that’s just unintentional self-exploitation of our own insecurities. BuT u DoNt WaNNA b nO hAtER, DAwG.

So anyways, if I remember any notable no-budget films, I’ll do a lil’ post on them in the hopes that they can lead by example that it very much so is possible to make something good or even great, or maybe at the very least inspiring, with whatever limited resources you have within your grasp.

A dude named Gabriel Fleming made a film called One Thousand Years on miniDV in the early 2000s. He basically made the whole thing as a one-person crew, with occasional help from a boom operator. Hellzyeah, mucho props on that. I somehow heard about it, and the short clips on the site impressed me so much I ordered his self-distributed DVD. Even though it’s lacking technically and formally (as are all no-budget films), this pre-mumblecore gem has some sparkling moments of artistry in it, in addition to a really great overall tone/texture– one that is genuinely auteur. And “genuinely auteur” is the most valuable, and unfortunately most rare, of qualities in narrative cinema. Kinda a bummer no one’s giving this dude 6 or 7 figure budgets to make films now, ten years later. But he did make another inexpensive feature called The Lost Coast which I’ve yet to see, though it’s in my long ass netflix instant que.

www.gabrielfleming.com/oty.html
Oh wait. Unfortunately I just noticed the clips and DVD ordering part of the site are down. Oh well.