Since being priced out of Austin, TX, I relocated to one of the dramatically less hipper cities in NC. It’s so unhip that it’s hours away from the nearest NC city with either a film school or even a modest film industry. Even Wilmington is known as “Wilmywood” and “Hollywood East.”
After recovering from my initial disappointment of not being able to partner with a local community college or some other institution of higher learning that has a film department, I focused my research on equipment. Since both my laptop and smart phone are old, I’d hedge my bet buying those two items with digital filmmaking in mind.
The laptop costs around $2K and the phone a little over $1K. Already more than my monthly take home pay.
But that’s not all!
I’d also need a “gimbal,” which I originally thought was a fancy word for a “selfie stick,” but the more I read, the more I liked the idea of having something to mount my camera on to help stabilize the shot. Although newer phones have a built-in stabilizer, I still want a tripod, which the gimbal I’m interested in has. So, that’ll be about $200.
Lastly, the app which turns smartphone cameras into a much easier to use film camera cost about $15. I’d buy this today if I knew upfront that I could transfer it to the new phone. Actually, the more I think about it, I want to grab that low-hanging fruit to start practicing with the camera I have now.
Of all the features on my current smartphone, I had no idea about altering the camera settings. Might be nice just to trial and error my way through the whole experience before investing thousands of dollars into equipment.
Next, I need to delete many pictures off my phone…eventually. I still have plenty of storage on my phone now that I no longer produce a monthly live show. I’m not even tempted to buy whatever the equivalent of a memory stick is in today’s current technology since all the important pictures have been used in a blog post, which is online.
I don’t want to be all dramatic and say that civilization would have to collapse before I completely lost all my pictures since: 1) I may be living through that right now with Florida leading the way, and 2) I’ll have greater concerns than digital pictures if civilization does indeed collapse. All I’m really saying is that I’ll survive when I delete pictures off my phone.
Besides, I love the idea of removing things that no longer serve me to make room for new experiences.