Making an Indie Film: Cinema in the Digital Age

PC Mag By Cade Metz From casting to cameras to postproduction, the all-digital making of The Insurgents redefines the meaning of "low-budget." If you know your movies, you know The Blair Witch Project. Shot largely with a Hi8 video camcorder and promoted with ingenious thrift over the Internet, the 1999 indie thriller was widely hailed as a triumph of modern technology. First-time filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo SÃ ¡nchez made Blair Witch for less than $25,000, and in the wake of a now famous midnight screening at the Sundance Film Festival, the film went on to gross more than $140 million in the U.S. alone. The rub is that Blair Witch doesn't look like a feature film, and it's not supposed to. That's part of its charm, but there's no forgetting that it was made on the cheap. The image is shaky and imprecise, the lighting harsh, the performances less than professional. At times, you can even hear the crew laughing in the background. Without its self-referential premise, Blair Witch is just another poorly made amateur film. The real revolution starts today. Eight years after Blair Witch, digital technology has improved to the point where you can make a true Motion Picture—with a cinema-quality image, bona fide special effects, even name actors—for little more than Myrick and SÃ ¡nchez spent on their run-and-gun indie. read more...