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Digital Cinema Filmmaker’s Training Course (24 hours) $439.00 $369.95
by Helmut Kobler Date Added: Friday 02 October, 2009
The Digital Cinema Filmmaker’s Training Course (DCT) goes way beyond the scope of any other DVD we’ve ever seen. Hardly a workshop, it’s much more like a full-fledged film school.

At $439, the DCT certainly isn’t cheap. On the other hand, it’s utterly comprehensive and exhaustive, packing in more than 24 hours of video instruction that’s narrated by indie filmmaker Rush Hamden, along with a supporting cast of working DPs, gaffers, grips, sound recordists, makeup artists, and more.

This truly is a film school on a disk (18 disks, actually), and it covers just about everything there is to the art and science of production. Topics include cameras, lenses, filters, lights, gels, light meters, field monitors, microphones, mixers, steadycam rigs, dollies and other grip equipment, screenwriting formats, framing and composition techniques, and more. Also included in the course is a 2-DVD “Gear Guide” for 2007, which features over 7 hours of in-depth introductions to popular equipment from major manufacturers like Arri (lights), Roscoe (filters), Century Optics, (lens adapters), and others.

With over 24 hours to work with, host Rush Hamden presents his material in great detail, and clearly has a passion for demystifying the nitty gritty behind any subject, so you really, truly understand it. For instance, in his lighting segment (5 hours), Hamden examines the major lights used in typical productions, from key lights and fill lights to background lights, back lights and kickers. He talks about tungsten lights versus HMIs. He goes through the various light-shaping accessories, such as soft boxes, snoots, barn doors, and filtration. But more importantly, Hamden painstakingly walks you through the step-by-step set up and use of these tools as he lights a variety of real-world scenes: among others, an intimate candlelight conversation between two characters; a job interview in an office; a poker game between three characters around a table, and a character reading by a window, mixing natural light with other light sources.

And that’s just a portion of the lighting chapters included in the DCT, which are in turn just a portion (though a significant one) of the entire course. What’s more, Hamden and his co-presenters are very clear in conveying their subject matter. No one rambles on, and you’ll definitely come away understanding even advanced material with few, if any, questions.

Naturally, the strength of the DCT is the massive amount of information that it conveys. And that level of detail, in fact, is also its only drawback, because you have to make a fairly hefty time commitment to absorb its lessons. This isn’t the kind of thing that you’ll watch in a few sittings—in fact, we tended to watch in 30-60 minute increments, before having to take a break due to information overload. The DVDs also don’t have a precise table of contents, so you can’t quickly find a narrow topic, and just home in on it (there are certainly chapter breaks in all the DVDs, but there’s so much detail within each chapter that we wish they had been broken up into smaller segments). In other words, just make sure you have the stamina and discipline to actually get through all that the course has to offer.

The Bottom Line: We’ve found no other book, class or DVD that teaches the filmmaking process like the DCT. If you’ve got the money and the time, you’ll enjoy an amazing film-school education that touches on just about every production topic imaginable.

Reviewed in Indie Slate magazine, Iss #50
by Helmut Kobler

Helmut Kobler is an documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]


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