Equipment for Indie Film Making

By Kevin Lindenmuth
Kevin Lindenmuth

Kevin Lindenmuth has worked in the film/video business for more than 20 years. He received his B.A. in film/video production from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1987. Most of his professional life was spent working in New York City in all the major aspects of video production. Kevin is an independent movie maker who helped pioneer SOV movie making in the early 90’s and paved the way for their acceptance to mega-chain video stores with his well-received vampire movie Addicted To Murder (1995). He has produced 18 genre movies (12 now available on DVD) and five documentaries (broadcast on PBS). He is the author of two books on independent filmmaking, both published by McFarland Books Publishers (1998 and 2001) and was interviewed in the book "The Independent Filmmakers Guide to Writing a Business Plan for Investors" (by Gabriel Campisi, 2004). Occasionally, his articles can be seen in Fangoria magazine.

www.lindenmuth.com

Professional advice on producing an independent film! Learn about equipment and how to make an indie film in this free video.

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For independent film making, you're going to need a camera; a good camera. Pick some type of digital camera. You can get them fairly cheaply. Cameras range from five hundred bucks to; you can spend four thousand dollars if you were going to go do HD. But just make sure you have a good camera. It has a good image. It has enough controls on it and all that. And you want to keep it digital because everything nowadays is digital. So, you have that. If you can't afford a camera, find somebody who has one that's available. Audio's really important. Make sure your record as good sound as possible on your production. And sometimes you can use the camera mic, but I don’t' really recommend it. I guess its okay if your subjects a couple feet away from the camera. But, generally, it's kind of bad to do that. You want another type of mic. If there's a scene between actors and they're talking, you usually can't have a lot of the lyres on them like this because you can see the microphone. If you use them, you'll have to hide them underneath their close and stuff but then you're going to get rustling and all that stuff. Generally, the best thing to do on a production where you have a scene where actors are talking going back and forth, is you have like a boom microphone and what it is; is like a boom, like a pole and they have the microphone on the end of it and somebody is holding it over the actors and stuff and kind of following them around. So, you need somebody just to do that. So, if you're doing camera or not, you're going to need another person just to handle the audio and listen to make sure the audio is good; that there's no background noise. Because the last thing you want to do is when you're finished with your production and you're editing is trying to fix the audio and like re-dub and audio with people. It's a huge hassle. You just don't want to do that. And lights, you just want to make sure you have a couple lights; all of the scenes are brightly lit. A lot of times since our cameras are so good with low light nowadays, some scenes, you might not even have to light. If you're shooting outside, it's not even; you need no lights at all. But just make sure you have a couple lights handy and again you can get professional lights that range in price from a couple hundred dollars each or you can go to a hardware store and get halogen lights or even those scoop lights and just make sure that you're scene is lit well enough. And in addition to your equipment, you're going to need gapers tape or duck tape. You're going to need pens. You're going to need a notebook to keep track of things. So, there's lots of stuff you're just going to need extra. Make sure you have enough tape stock and just make sure you're prepared for anything you might need during the production.