How to Choose a Low-Budget Camera

January 2023 - From the archives

Welcome to 2023! It’s a new year, I’ve got new updates, and yet another new email template. I hope you’re enjoying the variety!

This time, I have our first promo piece to share with you (skip to the end if you’re impatient to see it)! But I think this piece needs an introduction, so I’ll start there.

There are plenty of camera nerds and filmmakers out there who have asked me what we shot NEXT TIME on. It’s a question I’ve asked a lot of film friends, too. Shooting a low-budget movie requires a lot from one’s camera choice. It has to be low-maintenance, lightweight and flexible enough to shoot quickly; ideally, it will be pocket-size and not draw too much attention to us in those (unpermitted) exterior locations; it needs to be cheap to rent (that’s a given); and it has to look good. This last requirement is a bit subjective, and depends a lot on the lenses it’s paired with, its dynamic range, and - ironically - how easy the camera makes it to change the look in color grading. But most importantly, it has to deliver a “cinematic look.”

What did I find when I asked my low-budget-indie director friends about this? Usually, they ended up using a medium-range, lightweight DSLR camera like a Blackmagic Pocket, Canon 9D, or Lumix to shoot their film. Mostly, it was just whatever their DP owned. Paired with nice lenses and thoughtful lighting, they could make their cameras look really nice. So I asked my DP, Stephanie Hardt, what she thought about it. She told me her version of that “whatever’s available” camera was Sony’s FX3, but she didn’t own one, and anyway, she thought we could do better.

She called a contact at Sony, and we waited. He was on summer vacation, so I kept on looking at other options. Two weeks later, he was still on vacation. Steph kept calling, but summer seemed to last forever. I looked into renting a much nicer camera, but it would have eaten our entire budget for breakfast. I asked around to see what friends could offer us, but Stephanie didn’t know the camera my friend was volunteering very well, and wasn’t comfortable with it. Six weeks of summer had passed, reminding me that Europeans take their summer holidays very seriously, and we still didn’t have a camera, or anything more than an answering machine at Sony. Maybe we should shoot the movie on my phone, I thought.

Finally, Stephanie called me one day, three weeks before our shoot. Her contact (after a remote summer holiday in Greece) was offering her Sony’s VENICE 1, free of charge, shipped to us for the length of the shoot. Great! I had never heard of the Venice, but it seemed to fulfil the most important requirement of an indie camera - that being, it was free!

Then, I looked it up. It was a camera that didn't seem to need a lot of free publicity. Recent films shot on VENICE include Top Gun: Maverick and Downton Abbey. As a director, I was elated! We were going to be shooting at a different level, moving up to a new standard - cinematic, indeed. My slow-and-steady approach, using simple building blocks and doing what I know, well, was out the window - it was time for more! As the producer, I was worried… This camera arrived in 6 different boxes. It was massive and heavy. It might require half the crew to assemble. And who knows what kind of fancy post-production requirements it wanted from us?! Steph hadn’t used it either, which was also unnerving.

Was it the worst possible choice for a movie of such minor scale?

But, of course, Steph had a plan. The camera breaks apart into its own “mini” camera in front, with the rest of it worn as a Ghostbusters backpack (pictured below). Our brilliant camera assistants, Kriti and Toni, were both obsessive Sony nerds. And for our dynamic bike-shooting days, we went back to our good old matching friend, the FX3.

Meanwhile, Steph’s magic continued. SIGMA agreed to give us a full set of prime lenses, also for free, for the duration of the shoot. Although more known for high-end photography, Sigma’s cinema lenses are optimized for high-resolution shooting without that too-sharp see-every-pore look that I hate. They provided just the right balance of softness and sharpness, which is what, in the end, really gives “that cinematic look” to a project. And they didn’t take up nearly as much space as the Venice, either!

So what did I learn about the right camera choice for a project? Well… things don’t always go as planned in filmmaking - especially on a really small scale. But when one is open to new and challenging surprises, one realizes that every single one can transform a film! Part of directing is to take in new information, resources, and ideas, and make sure they work for the project to help create something that is maybe more than what you even initially dreamed. Because there will also be moments when circumstances conspire to make it less than what you hoped. And you have to learn to take what’s traded - the more - and give up the less - what’s on the cutting room floor, or in the remains of the scrapped schedule at the end of the day.

So, after all that, here it is: Sony interviewed Steph about her experience with the smashing VENICE, Sigma, and her work as a cinematographer. You can see it and learn more about her by clicking on the image below!

Until Next Time…

Emily + the Next Time Team

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"Berlin Provides" and Other Life Lessons from Micro-Budget Filmmaking

December 2022 - From the newsletter archive

While I have been to countless seminars, conferences and classes; listened to a lifetime’s worth of podcasts; been on many a set; gathered advice from friends, acquaintances, and film festival panels; I couldn’t help but learn a lot of things the hard way.

Every filmmaker has heard two pieces of what I would consider standard-issue advice for making shootable, low-budget films: write what you know, and set your film in a single location.

The theory goes that writers, especially new ones, will create more realistic scenarios and dialogue if they write from experience rather than imagination. And shooting in a single location, while it can be quite monotonous and visually suffocating, minimizes the time and money of shuffling between expensive set-piece locations, allowing filmmakers to focus more on character and story.

I have never been able to follow that advice. I always write stories that require loads of research because they don’t reflect my lived experience, and that take place in exotic locations, multiple countries, (think developing countries, gang-controlled big cities, hermit kingdoms, etcetera), with well-known and well-guarded architecture (think Baroque churches, Art Deco skyscrapers, particular funiculars, the 6th Street Bridge). No wonder it took me so long to actually shoot a feature film!

For NEXT TIME… I did spend a lot of time researching, but not for a story I had already started writing. When I moved to Berlin, I spent 5 years getting to know people and holding my ear to the ground, riding my bike around the city and getting to know the character of different neighborhoods, from quiet Altbau residential streets to the just-for-locals parks and the new construction ghost-towns and cramped flats in mid-century mid-rises; the script is what came out the other side. In the end, everything I wrote about was something I learned from my life and my observations: techno parties, misanthropes, daily cyclists, pan-European hipsters, eco-activists, creatives, 90s Adidas-tracksuit-wearers (it’s a standard issue for any long-time Berliner), luxury investors, well-dress real estate sleaze, street-corner interactions. Not having much money to make the film meant that setting it in a variety of “real life” places and situations, and casting actors who understood, and sometimes already inhabited that reality, was crucial. I wanted to make a film that looks like social realism or documentary, and then surprises you with some unexpected magic.

“Magical realism in a grungy, DIY setting” is the perfect aesthetic description of Berlin, and it’s somehow the feeling I wanted to transport. It’s also the essence of life in this city, where a combination of working-class-solidarity spirit, natural bounty, and generosity creates the feeling (especially in the summertime) that whatever the need, Berlin will provide. For me, the truth of Berlin’s magical realism is just that: “Berlin provides.”

A lot of times, that takes the form of something in a box on the street, with a note saying that the box contains free gifts for anyone to take. I’ve acquired a shocking amount of clothes, furniture, and appliances that way. (Otherwise I wouldn’t own a fancy milk-frothing machine!)

fLotte Berlin is a local organisation that loans expensive electric cargo-tricycles from community centres for three days at a time, for free, to anyone. People use them to transport their children to picnics, support a weekend pop-up business, or just to transport something over a short distance using a more green vehicle. So when my DoP, Steph, suggested we shoot the bicycle scenes from cargo tricycles instead of rigging car mounts, it made both aesthetic and practical sense. And Berlin provided through a couple of fLotte community centres from which we procured our free stunt vehicle rentals. (The one above is named Elsa, because every fLotte has a name and personality!) We took them from Weissensee to Neukoeln, from Wedding to Mitte — mostly on the same days. Elsa, pulled by energetic Olli, gave us the freedom to shoot tighter spaces and off-road bike riding sequences without drawing attention to ourselves, too. After all: the giant steadicam rig (see photo below) drew plenty of attention.

A few years ago, I researched the grassroots artist-community that had saved a giant, abandoned East German bureaucratic building from being sold by the city into private hands. Haus der Statistik, which was the East German statistics HQ before reunification, and a giant complex of abandoned office buildings for the 30 years since, was instead recovered and turned into public artist spaces with room for many of the collectives that have turned its ground floor into gallery space, theatres, and community centres. One of the buildings houses a giant upcycling emporium called the Material Mafia. It’s made up of a number of small groups, each with a different mandate to gather used trash, recycle it, and share it with the community. This is exactly the way in which Berlin’s solidarity often provides…

A bike workshop takes used bike parts and repairs discarded bikes, while making unusable parts into artwork. Our propmaster/bikemaster, Hannah, asked for their help procuring all of the bikes and locks she needed for the shoot, which could later be returned to them.

Another group finds used clothes, given away for free on the street, and washes them, repairs them, and rents them out for a small deposit. Thanks to this collective, we found many key costumes for free; in return, a lot of our thrift-shop-bought costumes were donated at the end of the shoot.

Artists bring paint, building materials, fabrics, and other extra materials to exchange them for new bits and bobs they need. Much of this work is not only non-extractive, it’s not-for-sale. One collective lends odd objects - radios, kitchen appliances, tools, chairs - like a library, on the condition that the borrower eventually returns the item. Orsi, our production designer, found paint, curtains, and other materials here throughout our shoot. The beauty is: when you use the extras of others and return your own extras, the system eliminates so much of the waste that’s usual on film sets.

But incorporating this real-life, “write-what-you-know” mindset to the culture of Berlin actually meant I too many different things that I knew. And this meant I had to break the other cardinal rule of micro-budget filmmaking: we shot for 12 days (an incredibly short schedule!) in 9 locations.

Retrospectively, I could say this was a mistake. Or, at least, “a learning experience.”

But maybe I’ll tell you more about that Next Time….

For now, I hope the generosity of Berlin’s upcycling, repurposing, and sharing culture inspires you in this season of gifting and generosity.

With much love for cinema and you,

Emily

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Welcome to Next Time

November 2022 - From the newsletter archive:

I’m Emily, the writer/director/producer of NEXT TIME… Although I have been a journalist, copywriter, screenwriter, short story author, and all-around writer for most of my life, I have never written my own newsletter! NEXT TIME… is my first feature film, and it’s taught me a lot about doing things for the first time. This was the first time I learned how to pick bike locks; the first time I signed up to be an Instagram Ambassador so that I could get free stuff for costumes; the first time I was an accidental costume designer; the first time I researched trademark law; and the first time I figured out how a time portal should look… among many other firsts!

I guess this is all just to say - I’ve learned a lot of new stuff in the past six months. Why not newsletter writing?

So from here until an as-yet ambiguous point in the future, you’ll be joining me for stories about strange and notable happenings in Berlin, indie filmmaking, the crafting (and soon, screenings!) of NEXT TIME… and perhaps some interviews with the cast and crew. If you find all of that interesting, maybe you’ll even share it with the rest of your friends who want to know how a time-travel, criminal-coming-of-age mystery gets made on a micro-budget.

Maybe the first thing you’re wondering about is this HOT orange bike. So, that will be my first story. This film began as an homage to a friend’s stolen bike story. T, the friend in question, was at a demonstration with his friend S and as they approached the bike rack where T’s Peugeot was stolen a year earlier, he looked longingly at said bike rack, conjuring the memory of his vintage white Peugeot. And suddenly: there it was! on the same bike rack, T’s Peugeot was being removed with a key, by a cyclist. He confronted that cyclist and discovered that the man bought the bike at a used bike shop, around the same time T’s was stolen. T confirmed a few scratches - and yes, the bike was his. But what to do now? The bike theft machinery had already swallowed his bike, refashioned it, and churned it back out to this new owner. This story is not a singular occurrence: bikes, a major form of everyday transport in Berlin (and all over Europe), are stolen on the daily, only to pop up again on Ebay Classifieds, Facebook Marketplace, or even in secondhand bike shops — of which there are many. Statista reported that more than 25,000 bikes were stolen in Berlin in 2021. That’s a lot of glum cyclists, kicking stones as they’re forced down the sidewalk on foot. Deutsche Welle, The Local and Berlin Spectator are among the news outlets that follow this pervasive petty crime and the surprisingly sophisticated criminal underworld turning those wheels. (Pun intended!)

Having your bike stolen - especially if it’s a nice bike - is a fact of life if you live in Berlin.

When I began writing NEXT TIME… I wanted to show a facet of Berlin’s street life, and I knew that a stolen bike, and the kind of thieves that target them, would be part of that. But to show how important bikes are to their owners, and how violating it feels for your bike to be stolen, I needed a bike that would instantly be an object of envy, the personification of freedom, and the image of perfection. It had to be iconic. That’s why I knew that bike would be a classic orange Peugeot. So I started searching for this bike. I spent the summer looking for someone crazy enough to rent me such an expensive bike!

That crazy - and exceptionally kind - person was Monsieur Velo, a French cycling enthusiast who runs a shop of the same name. He rents classic cruising bikes to tourists and sells top-of-the-line new and used Peugeot cycles. He had my hot orange dream bike in stock, and even in the right frame size. He agreed to let us use the bike, as well as the shop, for the film. He was excited to transfer his love of cycles to my audience. And with this bike secured, our film gained a dramatic visual focal point.

With that, I will leave you dreaming of orange. Thanks for reading!

Until Next Time…

Emily

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