Análisis de casos en materia civil

How do you go about shooting a movie? What equipment do you need? I started off with a borrowed 16mm camera I knew nothing about, but in a few minutes I learned everything I needed to know simply by making some calls to companies that dealt in used camera equipment.

Choose your weapon, whether it be video, 16mm, Super 16, 35mm, Super 8, Hi-8. None is better than the other. What your project is and what you expect to achieve will determine what you are going to use. It may also depend on what is most easily available to you. I talk to aspiring filmmakers who waste so much time asking people what kind of camera or format they should shoot on and blah blah blah. Grab the camera you can get your hands on fastest and start shooting with it. Everything else will fall into place. Otherwise you'll never get started, and that's the most important step to achieving anything: The first step. So take it and go.

I had my old trusty Sekonic light meter that I had bought a few years back at the photo shop where I used to work. It was still in great shape, so for light readings, all you do is set your film speed into the dial. If you're shooting outdoors, you'll use an outdoor film with a lower ASA, 64 maybe. So you dial in 64, hold the meter up against your actor's face, and aim the little white dome towards your camera. Now press the meter button and read off the number it gives you. Cool:Now, roll that number into your camera iris on your lens and you have your F-stop. What's an F-stop? Who cares what an F-stop is? Don't worry about the F-stop. I never did. Just do what the meter tells you; the meter is your friend. Just take that magic number that the meter whispers in your ear and set your lens to that number. Bingo. You've just become your own director of photography. Congratulations. Put your name on the credits as such. I did. If you overexpose your negative a little, don't sweat it. You'll get a denser negative with richer blacks and more saturated colors. You're clear.

Speaking of light meters, what about indoor lights? I decided to light all my interiors with practical light bulbs, or photofloods, and use a faster speed film. These are regular size light bulbs that fit in regular lamp sockets, but that give off light at 3200° Kelvin so it registers as white light. It'll give your film a natural, gritty feel. For a long while, before the concept of no- budget feature filmmaking came into practice, aspiring filmmakers would make short films or simply trailers, for their scripts in order to get attention and they would pour a lot of money into these short films and try and make them look as Hollywood slick as they could, to show they could be competitive. That's not a great idea. No matter how hard they tried, with their limited funds they could never make their demo as slick as Hollywood. They'd come off looking like cheaper imitations. So go the opposite way. Why try and make a slick-looking film when you have no money? Don't even try. Make a movie that Hollywood could never make no matter how much money they have. Tell a story they'd never risk, or make a movie that goes for the throat the way they'd never do, because they are too mainstream. Fill your film with great ideas, which they can't come up with no matter how much money they have. They can't make their movies more creative with money. Only more expensive. The creative person with limitless imagination and no money can make a better film than the talentless mogul with the limitless checkbook

every time. Take advantage of your disadvantages, feature the few assets you may have, and work harder than anyone else around you. When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit.

OK. Back to shooting your movie. Hold the camera and look at your actor through your lens. No camera stand? Good. There's nothing worse than having a decent camera stand when shooting a low-budget movie. Because a decent camera stand will get you nowhere. A great camera stand will probably work wonders. I don't know, I've never used one. But I know what a decent camera stand will do for you: nothing. It will make you want to lock the camera down so what you end up with is a stiff-looking movie that looks dead.

The answer? A shitty camera stand. The one I had on Maria-chi wasn't even for film cameras. It was a still camera tripod, one of those wimpy ones. No fluid head, no nothing. I put my film camera on and it barely held it up. Mine broke by the end of the shoot. I used it for close-ups during dialogue scenes. All my dialogue scenes were shot with the camera locked down. You don't need a fancy tripod for that. And since the stand was so useless for panning or tilting, it actually freed me up to take the camera off the stand and run around handheld, and shoot documentary style. It gave the movie more energy.

So put some energy in your movie! Energy is good, energy adds production value, makes your movie look more expensive. You can't believe the number of people, professionals and non, that told me how expensive my movie looked just because the camera was constantly moving. Of course, I was moving the camera! If I tried to stand still with the camera and try and hold it steady with my arms it would still move around a little as I breathed. So if it's gonna move a little anyway, why not move it a lot? Make it look like you've got a dolly, a Steadicam, or a crane, something expensive.

OK, so you're looking at your actor through your camera. You're not locked down on a stand so you're in a great position to get a great shot because . . . what do you see? You're the audience now, looking through the lens at the actor. Is this the most interesting angle you can be watching this movie from? Move the camera and see what the scene looks like now if you squat, and shoot from a lower angle, looking up at your actor. Move in closer, do you really need to see the lack of production design on your set? Move in close and fill the frame with an interesting-looking actor. The interesting human will always beat out the uninteresting set. How's this angle? Is it interesting but not too distracting? Good. Again this is one way to do it. Question everything and find what's best for you.

Now before shooting anything, you should really watch your movie in your head. Play it out in your head, watching it while imagining the actors and angles you've chosen. Picture the scene. See what cuts you'd make if you were editing it together. Would you stay on one actor the whole time, or would you

cut midscene to something else? Watch the movie In your head; then when you think you've seen something interesting, get out a piece of paper and make your shot list. List each shot you need to make the scene work. Don't overdo it, just follow your instincts. On a low-budget, shoot-from-thehip kind of movie your instincts are all you've got, so start learning to trust them. Trust your instincts and your light meter. I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to do everything I needed to do on El Mariachi. So I had no choice but to trust my instincts and they served me well.

After you've made your shot list, go through it. Read the shots you've written and watch them in your head, as if it's a cut movie. Are you missing any shots? Watch it again. What shots do you see in the movie that you're watching in your head which are not written down. Write those down. Now keep that shot list handy because now with your list you can concentrate on one shot at a time. All you have to do now is get each shot and cross it off the list. When your list is completely crossed off you're done for the day. Congratulations.

Note: If it seems that I'm oversimplifying even these basic aspects of filmmaking, I'm not! I think it's best not to concentrate your energy on all the pain-in-the-ass details that aren't that important at this point in your career. I'm telling you what you need to know in order to get by, so you can free yourself up to concentrate on what's really important: the pacing, the characters, the story. No one will ever care that your movie has great F-stops. Is the story compelling? Are the characters interesting? When it's all over, those are the only things that will really matter. And all the rest will be forgiven.

You should learn every aspect of the filmmaking process no matter what area in film you think you want to go into. If you work each job yourself you'll have a better sense of what you really want to do. Later on, if you're directing a movie, you'll know the needs of the sound recordist, the camera operator, etc. because you would have done all that before.

On one movie I was shooting with a film crew, we were consistently getting an unheard-of number of camera setups per twelve-hour day. One day we got as many as seventy-eight setups in one thirteen-hour day with a single camera. Now I could never push a crew to get that many setups by sitting in a director's chair and barking "faster faster!" at them. They'd have told me to fuck off. But what I did was simply pick up the camera and begin shooting my shot list, as quickly as I felt I could go and get the shots correctly. My crew saw me with the camera getting the shots and would work right alongside me. Had I asked them to do it alone, they'd have called me crazy and left. The fact that I was shooting made it easier to get cooperation and to work together, because they knew that if I could do it, they could do it. So without any complaining or anyone dropping dead, we were able to move fast and get everything quickly. The actors had a great time because they were constantly acting, and we shot so many scenes that day they were never stuck in a

groove, repeating the same two lines for five takes. They actually got to rip through their scenes, maintaining an energy and spontaneity they could never display if the movie was shot at a slower pace for more shooting days. The energy would have been killed.

Why is it that when you see movies in a theater today, they seem for the most part big and lifeless? The reason is because the energy was killed before the cameras ever ran. By moving slowly you suck the energy and momentum from not only the actors, but the movie as well. The movie will only last about an hour and a half anyway. Why take three months to film something that will last ninety minutes? The faster you move, the less your movie will cost. And the shooting environment will be more conducive to creativity and imagination, not to mention the fact that your movie will have a level of envery that a big, fat, slow Hollywood production could never match, no matter how much money they spend.

So don’t think that in order to make movies you have to make them Hollywood-style. Their way is so slow and expensive that you’ll find yourself falling asleep on the set and forgetting to say “action.”

With the advances in film technology, you can shoot your movie entirely in available light, or with a few practicals. That’s what I used on El Mariachi.