A New Film Language: “Amateur Video”

Abstract

Film making has been a very expensive hobby for ameteurs from the day it was discovered. Also it has not been taken as a professional tool for years. Especially after Griffth’s approaches on camera movements, camera angles, framing techniques such as medium shot or close-up. The quality level of filmmaking between amateurs and professionals has been highly spread. Today, by the help of new technologies these two fields got closer. Now we can make near-professional films by using amateur equipments; we can edit them at our home computer, we can even prepare some music at home by using the help of some softwares. Also we can freely share it by using websites such as Youtube, Vimeo or some others. So for amateurs its not only easy and cheap to produce a film but also it is easy and cheap to distribute it. The number of amateur movies produced today are much more then professional movies. The enormous number of amateur productions also affected the audience and created “a new way” of story telling like shaked camera movements, deficient lighting, grainy look. This way of story telling first was discomforting and disorienting for the audience, but later they got used to it. This also affected the professionals: lots of production firms started to make professional films which used ‘amateur way’ of story telling. This study intends to discuss this new way of telling a story and implications associated with this new approach. The discussion will focus on three selected professional films using this new approach, namely “District 9” (2009), “Cloverfield” (2008) and “Paranormal Activity” (2007). These films use jump-cuts, deficient lighting and grainy pictures, contrasting strongly with traditional way of story telling. Thus, the study will explore the important points of using editing applications, lighting, image composition and camera movements with their relationship to the existing cinematography, trying to find an explanation to this new perception of reality in digitalization.