Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production business,The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Stewart has carved out his own niche in the film community, documenting the festival environment with experimental shorts for Filmmaker magazine, Focus Features and others.

In this series of columns, Jamie will examine the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking.

Near the end of 2002, I attended a Steven Spielberg tribute at Lincoln Center. During the onstage Q&A that comprised most of the evening, Spielberg emphatically argued that there was no such thing as a true auteur because filmmaking is too collaborative an enterprise. Generally speaking, I've agreed with that assessment. So how I stumbled into becoming one (for the time being, anyway), can best be described as the long gestating result of budgets, control and the evolution of consumer technology.

In 1987, at age 12, I started work on my first short film using an old Super-8 camera. Designed as a 3-minute stop-motion claymation book report on Jaws, I did everything from creating the models to building the sets to shooting it, and even voiced most of the characters. Upon taking credit for all of that in the end titles, my two friends who helped with the voice-over bludgeoned me with mockery.

Super-8 Camera

At about the same time, my father bought a top-of-the-line (for its time) Panasonic VHS camcorder. It was bulky, and I recall that after the smaller Hi-8 cameras came in, I was a little jealous of those. What made the camera special was its full array of built-in FX, allowing me to apply in-camera dissolves, fades, wipes or even a strobe-like slo-motion. Most of the editing was done in-camera, though I ultimately got a small, crude mixing board and started doing camera to VCR composing. There weren't a lot of aspiring filmmakers where I grew up, so invariably I worked alone quite a bit, starring in my own shorts. I got pretty good at clocking the camera's 2-second recording delay to rush in front and hit my mark.

This ad hoc approach prepared me for a pretty nuclear situation a few years later, when, due to the Blizzard of '96, I lost my locations, crew and actors just as I'd started shooting a 16mm short. Since I only had the gear for a limited time, I quickly wrote a new script and immediately went into production with a crew of two people, including myself. Compounding the situation was that I had to star in it as well. The entire shoot consisted of me setting up a shot, running in front of the camera to clap the slate (while the second crew member manned the Nagra and the boom), tossing the slate out of frame, acting the moment, then running back to stop the camera. The lone positive in this approach was that because the editing was non-linear, I could easily chop off the beginnings and ends of the shots; however, this was equaled in negativity by the fact that film costs money. And that negative led to a long drought in my life.

Cut ahead six years: halfway through my first short in as long, after starting production in 16mm with a planned flatbed edit, a rain delay and budget issues forced me to complete the project in mini-DV. I was also introduced to Final Cut Pro, version 2 at the time -- I installed a bootleg on my PowerBook G4 and haven't looked back.

In the half dozen years since that fateful transition to digital, my tools have progressed as rapidly as my ability to use them. Borrowed 1-megapixel NTSC mini-DV cameras were pushed aside by Panasonic's 3CCD HG-DVX100 in 24p, which was then pushed aside by Panasonic's AG-HVX200 in 720p -- and with that, tape-based mini-DV recording was replaced by files captured directly to a FireStore hard drive. During the same time, my laptop with 256 MB of RAM and 10 GB of storage has grown into a unit with 2 GB of RAM and 125 GB of storage. Final Cut Pro has spawned half a dozen updates and turned into a suite of seven different post-production programs encompassing everything from sound design to color correction.

Most important, I found the perfect means of distribution in the Internet. Prior to the adoption of broadband, independent filmmakers were required to play the film festival game. Now, I can own my own website, and overnight, a single release can be seen by more people than a short might traditionally on the festival circuit in an entire year. The simple fact is that without digital shooting, post-production and distribution I could never have followed through on becoming a filmmaker.

And this brings us to the present.

(To be continued...)