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Also here was a rich seam of fresh ideas. Unfettered by commmercial constraints and focus groups, the ideas and styles here were brand new and original. There is an argument that great art comes directly from the heart of the artist, and camcorders and Super 8 afforded film makers the opportunity to make art straight from the heart.

Not all the films were a mess. Some film makers instinctively made good films and videos. Shane Meadows of "twentyfourseven" and "A Room For Romeo Brass" made his early films with a VHS camcorder and his mates goofing around in the streets of Nottingham but the star quality and the instinctive understanding of the medium are clearly there.

One of Meadow's early techniques, and one used by a lot of no to low budget filmmakers is the dispensing of dialogue



and ambient sound altogether and putting music and titles, words or subtitles over the images. Apart from the problem of getting actors to turn up, finding an editing suite and lighting, sound is usually the main problem with cheap filmmaking. Ideally actors should be miked up with radio mikes or a boom running to a mixer but this is a comparatively technical field and sound engineers do not usually come cheap. Apart from dispensing with ambient sound completely and putting music or sound effects over the images, the best solution is probably to shove the camcorder in the speakers faces and try to eliminate exterior noise.

There is a growing army of low to no budget filmmakers who have had to adapt to the limitations of the medium and the budget and for many of them this has been half the fun of the whole enterprise. The mainstream has not been slow to pick up this style and many is the new wave film, promo and pop video director who has instructed his cameraman to "wobble his camera about in a home movie style".

There is even now a camcorder strand of mainstream filmmaking from Oliver Stone to Mike Figgis, from "Blair Witch Project" to Dogma.


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