The Biggest Difference: Money. Hands down.

Hey, everyone wants to shoot 35mm, ourselves included. Not everyone has $2,000,000 laying around, ourselves DEFINITELY included. This is why DV has become such a viable option. It's a medium that looks great on it's own, looks great film-looked, or looks great blown up to 16 or 35 millimeter film. Everyone knows that your movie doesn't have to look like "Apocolypse Now" to be very successful. Look at films like "The Brothers McMullen," "Slacker," and "Clerks," and ESPECIALLY Blair Witch. These films don't look like cinematography masterpieces, but they tell their stories very well. If DV had been an option when these films were made, it probably would have been used, and the results, as seen in the theater, would be almost identical. Here are some more perks to shooting DV:

  1. Instant Dailes. You don't have to wait for the film to process to make sure you got the shot.
  2. Smaller, Less Expensive Equipment. Small cameras mean it's WAY easier to shoot without permits. Try getting a 35mm Arriflex into your local mall unnoticed. You can also use less-expensive cranes and steadi-cams, smaller lighting kits, and even go with available lighting.
  3. Ease Of Re-Shooting. Sooner or later, you miss a shot. Or you erase some audio. Or you notice the boom mic that's hanging in front of your lead actor's head that no one seemed to see at 3:00 a.m. inside that little taco place. When these things come up, you can spend $5 on a new tape, or about $2000 on a film re-shoot.
  4. Budget Control. Let's face it. We all occasionally make something that stinks. It's just no good. It can be a single scene in a movie, or a whole movie. When you shoot a feature on film, if it's bad in the end, you have two choices. Let the $60,000 dollars you've already spent go to complete waste, or spend another $60,000 trying to make it better. Shoot DV, make a stinker for $1,900, and, cost wise, you can compare it to a quarter at a community college except that you'll learn a whole lot more. If you trash it, you can learn from your mistakes. If you decide to try to fix it, what's it gonna cost you, another $1,000? Not that $1,000 is peanuts, but compared to $60k it is!
  5. Options, Options, Options. When you shoot your feature on DV, you have a lot of options. You can keep it looking like video, or you can film-look it. If you like it, you can blow it up to film. If not, you can make another movie and blow that one up to film. If you get a distributor, and they like your movie, they can pay to blow it up. Or, if it's only going to be released in video stores, there will never be a need to blow it up. What this all means is that you have many stops along the way to ask yourself, "okay, do I really want to spend more money on this project?" With film, you've probably spent at least $55,000 just to get to the first cut. Even on a complete micro-budget, you're gonna spend $5,000 with film, which is up to five times more than you'll spend on the same project shot on DV. By the way, with that $5,000 budget, you definitely have to sacrifice...
  6. Shooting Ratio. You're using friends for actors, family for actors, community theater over-actors for actors. You can forget about one-take wonders here. They're not gonna get it right the first time. Maybe not the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh--well, you get the point. When film is costing you $90 a second, and they're blowing one line after another, you feel your heart in your throat (or their throat in your hands.) With DV, you can LITERALLY shoot 20 hours of footage for $100! With that many takes, they will get it right! By the way, 20 hours of 16m rawstock will run you about $18,000, which, for the math impaired, is $17,900 more. That's not even counting processing, transfer, etc. The fact of the matter is, you can get more creative, better looking, breath-taking shots much easier with DV than with film, considering the fact that you can shoot it as many times as you like, use smaller equipment, and oh--did we mention--since it's DV, you can rewind and tape over a bad take with NO quality losss at all? Try to do that with film.

The downside to shooting DV

It's not film. DV is still a relatively new technology, and it is not yet as widely accepted as film. It won't be as easy to sell your DV feature for millions of dollars. Then again, it didn't cost millions to make. Everybody wants to shoot 35mm. Sure, we know that. We do, too. If you have the budget to do it, God bless you and your budding project. But, if you're like us, college kids, ex-college kids, never been to college kids, kids without a lot of money (in our book, under 40 is still a kid, and over 40 is just barely adolescent) then we honestly believe that DV is the absolute best way to get your feature made.