What looks "cinematic'?

James and I have been having this ongoing discussion about what differentiates a professional film from the stuff you see at the indie level that we seem to be a part of at the moment.

Story (writing) and performance are typically problematic in a huge percentage of low budget films, but if you removed those two elements and focused simply on how the film looks, the vast majority of them fall far short visually of anything you'd pay to see... But why? That is one question we want to have an unambiguous answer for before we schedule day one.

We've been talking about a lot of elements, too many for me to cover in detail in a single post, but many of them (or at least most of those we've been discussing) rest squarely on the shoulders of the DP, which is why I can see James is so concerned about this topic...

Moving the camera with jibs or dollies or even hand held moves for that matter are some of the big differentiators that we had noticed. But there's a number of other elements such as use of interesting camera angles, good shot selection, and complete, yet thoughtful coverage of each scene.

While examples of this sort of technical execution are easy to come by in theaters, they are more difficult to find in features that are produced at the budget levels that we're talking about with LOD.

One example that we found that demonstrates the use of these technical elements in a low budget feature is New Hampshire filmmaker Steve Croke's film "The Busker". A preview of the film can be found here.

As we find more examples, I'll try and post them.