Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production company, The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Jamie has carved out his personal 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 examines the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking. This is his third installment. Read the previous one here.

The first web series I did was at the New York Film Festival in 2004. The series, created for just $250 (food/travel), consisted of 14 shorts -- one for each day of the press screenings -- and it helped bridge the gap between journalism and narrative filmmaking. I already had a foot in movie press from running the website MovieNavigator.org from 2002-04, and after trying to convince a few publicists to let me do web video for much of that year, Lincoln Center finally offered me the freedom to experiment.

A few months earlier, I'd joined forces with two friends to start a new site called CrossoverFollowing.com (now deceased), for the sole purpose of promoting our filmmaking via the web. We invested in a Panasonic AG-HVX100A, a tripod and Final Cut HD. While HDV had already been introduced to the marketplace, the Panasonic, shooting mini-DV, became the standard for a couple of years based on its 24p capabilities. I shot everything for three years with that camera running exclusively at 24p and the Cine-D gamma preset.

Now, this was before YouTube. Our website had Flash Players I'd created to introduce a few pages, but primarily my work was showcased in Quicktime encoded MPEG-4 (the same standard I use today). There really weren't many examples to follow in doing this -- the phenomenon of web video was still over a year away -- so I basically made things up as I went along.

I set as my goal to create one video per day during the festival, and this often required 18 hour days. The series lasted nearly three full weeks. Not only did I lock myself into a different theme for each week (P.O.V., music video, black & white), but I tried to do something different each day. There were a lot of technical firsts for me, and I often figured things out as I did them.

One day, just to shake things up a little, I decided to add cartoon characters to the footage I shot. I had never blended live-action with animation before, nor done any digital animation at all. Furthermore, I had no idea what the characters would be before I got home from the festival that day to edit. Nothing was prepared. It was a crash course. Finally, I settled on cartoons of various filmmakers giving me the finger (Scorsese, Tarantino, Kubrick). I didn't own After Effects, so the process I quickly figured out involved exporting still-sequences of the live-action clips from FCP, then importing them into Flash, where I drew the characters and animated them with keyframes. Situations like that were perfect examples of using creativity to overcome budget/technical deficiencies, yet at the same time, it couldn't have been accomplished if the minimal technology wasn't there.

Thanks to a lot of determination (and coffee), I pulled off the series. Prior to this experiment, I'd always been rigid in my pre-planning, storyboarding everything shot-for-shot. And although this process of improvisation was 180 degrees from what I was used to, I believe my training in visual language through storyboarding is what ultimately prepared me to "trust in the Force," so to speak.

Having already honed my skills at shooting myself first on VHS as a kid, and then on 16mm a few years later, the move to mini-DV, with its hour-long tapes and camera flip-out LCD monitor, was effortless. Now, not only didn't I have to worry about the cost of running the camera for long periods as I ran back and forth to start and stop the camera, I could also view myself on the LCD to make sure the compositions were what I wanted.

In the end, fourteen short films existed that I'd shot, edited and starred in without a single person helping out. Through the evolution of technology I had become an accidental auteur.

Check out Jamie's New York Film Festival shorts here.

(To be continued...)