How to Produce a Video

Interesting movie tidbit: At this year's Sundance Film Festival over 4,000 films were submitted for consideration. Given that kids (even children in their 30s and 40s) today are very interested in film and video production, How to Produce a Video would seem, judging from its title, to be a natural choice for public, school and academic career library collections. Unfortunately, like many of those 4,000 films submitted to Sundance (of which only a fraction were selected for competition), you can't judge a film/video by its title. In this workmanlike effort--which takes viewers from the pre-planning, budgeting, and research and scriptwriting stages, through the lighting, shooting, and editing stages of video production--various production personnel mechanically read their job duties off cue cards. While there are a handful of good pointers, especially regarding planning a budget, most of the information is notably generic (in the section on cameras for instance, the program doesn't even mention the swiftly-growing acceptance of lower priced digital video cameras). Video production is, as the program claims, "costly, complex, and time-consuming," but this video barely scratches the surface of these issues in a mere fifteen minutes. Optional, for larger collections. Aud: E, I, J, H, P. (R. Pitman)