who's making short films on micro cameras?

[Todd Bradley]

I've heard Paddy talk about his ideas to do a short film using a Flip video camera he got for Christmas.  But I haven't seen the final film yet.

Then today I saw this article about the first short film done all with an iPhone 4:

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/06/29/video-shot-and-edited-entirely-on-an...

Anyone else out there doing great film work with unusually tiny cameras?  Wanna talk about your experiences so far?

[Andrew Gingerich]

I have a Kodak Zi8 that I love to death. I haven't used it for any really serious film projects, but I use it all the time as a sort of visual notebook and I make a point of taking it with me everywhere. Here are the points in the Zi8's favor, compared to, for instance, the Flip:

- Removable SD-based storage means I can pop in a 16GB card and shoot for hours
- 1080p video--certainly not great, but darn good
- Image stabilization
- 1/8" mic jack for better sound
- Manual focus, believe it or not, via a mechanical "macro" switch on the top of the camera

The lens was too telephoto for my liking, so I made a modification of my own: I epoxied a step-up ring around the outside of the lens so that I can pop on a wide-angle conversion lens whenever I feel like it.

Since the files are saved to an I-frame based codec (h.264, I think?), I generally transcode them to something like ProRes before editing in Final Cut. It's not the simplest workflow, but I've never had any problems.

I've been playing with the camera for about six months now and so far I haven't made anything spectacular with it, but its small, no-frills design really lends itself to documentary shooting and documentary-style narratives, and the fact that it's so much cheaper than most other "real" cameras means I'm not afraid to take risks with it in order to get interesting shots. The only major shortcomings I see are the lack of manual exposure and white balance control, which can make it difficult to do anything creative in terms of lighting, and the low bit rate at which the videos are encoded, which leads to some blocky artifacting when shooting handheld and can make color grading virtually impossible. But for the price, it's definitely a fun piece of kit and it allows me to grab a camera and start shooting instantly if I see something interesting happening.