Product ReviewsBooks
Author Ed Gaskell Hollywood, Bollywood or Pinewood. Or indeed the woods at the back of your house. Wherever you want to make your movie, this attractive and enthusiastic book provides all the inspiration you need to get started. With money-saving tips for building your own blue screen, and keeping glycerine or Golden Syrup in your make-up kit, this is essential reading for the first-time director. The closing section is where you'll turn first, as it's packed with indispensable advice. How you shoot a high-speed car chase on public road without breaking the law, how you make ghosts appear, and how to turn your leading lady into a werewolf are all explained in detail. More ambitious filmmakers will also learn how to shoot their own
Don't put this down as a bluffer's guide, though. While it may show you cost-effective means to getting the best results, it isn't blind to the practicalities of producing a film. There's sensible advice on lighting, make-up and casting your actors, and it makes it clear that what you think is low budget may actually be unrealistically low. Its 'bare minimum' kit-list is the kind of stuff you'd expect Michael Palin's crew to be lugging across the Himalayas, not what you'd see in the back of a wedding photographer's van. By necessity, the technical sections are cross-platform, covering both Premier Pro and Final Cut Express. Most of it, though, covers the planning and shooting stages and in the longer run it is these that will be of most value to the green-fingered filmmaker. Setting out to match the pros is an ambitious goal, and the scope of this book is so wide and so deep that it gives you the best chance you could hope for. There's only one downside: once you've read it, you'll watch every film with an analytical eye. No longer will you wonder how Frodo and Gandalf could interact when they were so out of proportion, or why the brutality of Fight Club was so easy to believe. By Nik Rawlinson |
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