About a year ago I made a post about the effect of small chip/focal plane imaging on the look of contemporary pornography, Size Does Matter, which was in large measure a self-serving (if true) rant on how and why the larger focal planes in film cameras make it easier to create pleasing images of naked people; and how the teenie tiny focal planes (and correspondingly small/cheap lenses) found in today’s digital cameras have ushered in an era of slightly out of focus, wide-angle, infininate depth of field, and generally unflatteringly shot porn.

This is not a way to make yourself popular in the indie art scene. Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Panasonic and the rest have spent billions and billions of dollars playing on the aspirations of a gerneration of filmmaker hopefuls.

“Your (digital) dreams can come true! You just have to want it enough, and buy our lastest $3500 camera and the latest $2500 computer” (Those seem to be the marketing magic price-points).

You won’t make a lot of friends in Williamsburg or other hipster enclaves telling indie film wannabes that The Man is selling them a pipedream form of a bunch of electronics that will be obsolete by the time they get the box home. (In fact, I’m a panelist at the upcoming Q-Me Con, a weekend devoted to queer digital media, and have been wondering whether I should just go, smile, play nice and make connections; or tell people, who will be paying $25 to hear what I have to say, what I really think about the digital swindle.)

Still, that doesn’t mean people can’t do lovely work using low-cost digital tools. I’ve got a pair of Sony PD100a cameras that I’ve had since the week they came out. They’ve been all over the world with me and they’ve shot some of my favorite projects, including Marie and Jack and Xana and Dax. More recently we’ve been using the Panasonic DVX100AP for our interviews, which uses a clever 3:2:2:3 pulldown scheme when shooting 24P, and that integrates very nicely with the 24fps film we use to shoot the actual humping.

Much more impressive than anything we’ve done with these tools are the wonderful comedy shorts coming from Kirby Ferguson’s Goodie Bag television. By now I’m sure you’ve seen the catchy and hilarious Do You Take it in the Ass?, but that’s just one of about two dozen very funny shorts that Kirby and his friends have produced – all on low-cost home video equipment. See Kirby & Co have some nifty little after-market extras that don’t come with the stock $3500 camera: Talent and creativity!

With that as a starting point, Kirby has gathered around him a crew of very funny, very hard-working actors, muscians, comedians. Throw in very clever writing, committed and credible acting, great musical choices and crisp editing, and Kirby’s shorts are like the one or two genuinely hilarious sketches SNL still manages to crank out each season. Would they be better on Digibeta? Sure, but Kirby & Co aren’t “waiting for funding”. They’re doing it now, with the tools at hand, and it’s great!

These bits funny as postage stamp videos sitting at your computer, but Kirby sent us his DVD and Peggy and I have been watching on the big screen and they’re even better! Zippy Whipcracker, a self-help infomercial send up, and one of the “oldies” not available at Goodiebag.tv had us laughing so hard Peggy started weeping. If you’ve enjoyed these online, do yourself a favor and buy yourself a copy of the Goodie Bag DVD today.

(See? Size still matters.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 at 11:17 am and is filed under Filmcraft, Goodie Bag, Kirby Ferguson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.