Interview: Robin Schmidt, gunslinger in the new Wild West of digital filmmaking
Robin Schmidt is a very, very happy man.
More happy than someone who got the chance to go and make a movie in the Bahamas ought to be. I mean, we’d all be happy after that.
But the 32-year-old British filmmaker is happy for another reason.
His delightful musical number Open Your Eyes won the 14 Islands Film Challenge – a contest set up by the Bahamas tourism office to get something new, something different as a promotional tool. His prize? A fat check, an official Ambassadorship for Canon and its digital imaging products, and recognition from all over the world for his work.
If Schmidt’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s made a bit of a splash in recent months, before he starting winning awards for things.
His forthright and hilarious weblog, on which he has posted numerous scathing comments about the Canon 7D DSLR, has become one of the best places for others to learn about its quirks. We’ve mentioned his blogging at Photocine News before.
In the light of his 14 Islands Challenge success, I spoke to Schmidt during a break in the middle of “a nasty edit”, and started by asking him why, out of all the things he could have done, he made a comic musical for the competition?
Needless to say, Schmidt had not visited the Bahamas before. He had no idea what he’d find when he got there.
“I got the impression that the film that won would be one that straddled the line between being a film that could stand up in its own right, and one that could tell you everything that’s good about the island without knocking you on the head with it,” he said.
“Rather than shooting a travel brochure, we had to find a way of finding everything that was great about the place.”
Lacking any ideas for a story, Schmidt flew out with no script and no structure. “Just a bunch of ideas.”
During a crazy few weeks of production, Schmidt tore round looking for locations, while the concept of a musical number formed in his head. Locals there play home-made instruments in a style akin to British skiffle or American bluegrass; it’s an organic, for-the-fun-of-it kind of music. It’s infectious and full of fun. And that was the starting point for the whole film.
Schmidt had only recently bought his 7D, but competition rules said he couldn’t shoot everything with it. In the end, after some negotiation with organisers, he was told he could shoot just 20 per cent of the film on the 7D.
“It meant getting out a calculator and working out how many frames I’d done,” he said with a laugh.
“I kept switching to the 7D just for particular shots, when the XH A1 couldn’t give me what I needed. The scene in the cave, for example – the XH A1 couldn’t cope in there. Also the 7D gave me a lovely wide shot in the classroom that I couldn’t get with the XH A1. I kept jumping back to the 7D and thinking Thank God I’ve got this.”
Schmidt calls himself a punk: “I’ve done things the non-traditional way.”
He didn’t go to film school. He worked his way through a series of music videos, learning as he went along. He earned a reputation as someone who can create good visuals on a budget. On his website, he talks about the “new Wild West in filmmaking”, declaring: “this is one of the most exciting periods of technological convergence since those first iMacs started shipping with firewire ports and iMovie.” And yes, that’s how he started.
The Canon 7D is at the centre of Schmidt’s productivity, it’s a device he simultaneously loves and hates.
“I’m a magpie, I’m drawn to exciting and shiny stuff. What’s interesting about the 7D is that it’s a horribly flawed tool, it really isn’t a very good video camera.”
Yet it wins competitions.
“Yes, as we’re all learning, image is 100 per cent everything, and the 7D gives you that. So many people are abandoning their normal cameras in favour of this, which is amazing because it doesn’t work very well. It’s training me to have a better eye for framing, to be a better director. I’m not a cinematographer, and I’d never call myself a cameraman, just an interested amateur. I want to learn about camera choices. The 7D shows you what’s possible.”
Now he gets really animated:
“It shows you that you can make any kind of trivial piece of work meaningful; it can have a purpose. With the 7D you can shoot a turd on the pavement and it will still look amazing. It renders the trivial and meaningless suddenly beautiful and exotic.”
Wow. No wonder Schmidt wrote something on his site about being scared of how the 7D changes things – and that’s at the same time that he is falling in love with with things it can do.
Really? Is he really scared?
“Yes, definitely!”
I didn’t expect him to say that.
“The thing is: there used to be an apprenticeship process in the film and video world, and you did your time. But I didn’t do that – I jumped on the tools that Apple and DV cameras were giving us, and I taught myself. I learnt lessons the hard way.
“What we’re seeing now is is different again. The gap between what’s glossy & expensive, and what we used to shoot on DV cameras; that gap is gone.
“Anyone with a DSLR is capable of shooting very beautiful video. If you’re a client and you’re looking at people’s work, how are you going to tell whether they can deliver or not in other ways. The grand differentiator will be the ability to stand out, tell a good story, be a good director, and know a good editor.
“The people who will do well out of this will be the editors.
Talking of editing, Schmidt believes in a bit-by-bit, modular approach to buying kit. Get what you need, adapt along with the technology. Is the price you pay for something like a hardware encoding and recording device going to be worth the time saved?
“You’ve got to look at this stuff as a scalable return on investment. I don’t think the 7D offers value for money if you pimp it out the way it needs to be pimped. But what it does give you is a modular system in which most of the investment will be good for five or six years, by which time it will have paid back. If you are in the business of being a hybrid, especially.
“Really, video pros like me should be buying videocameras, not DSLRs. DSLRs will remain DSLRs for a long time to come, and videocameras really should be catching up because that’s their job. I’ve done a lot of nerding-out about this, and there are certain devices that are very exciting, but a little patience is required to see what the video divisions of all these companies are going to come out with next.”
So. What’s next? Well, Schmidt now has £14,000 in the bank, which he will use to fund an intense writing period this summer. He wants to make a feature film – but before that, a short film. Another learning exercise.
And there’s the Canon Ambassadorship, which sounds like every Photocine News readers’ (and writers’) dream come true. Canon will send him new stuff to play with, ask what he thinks of it. He’s determined to be honest. When you get an opportunity like this, you grab it.
“I’ve told them what I think of the XH A1. They know about that. I know they’re working on a tapeless camera that will shoot uncompressed 4:2:2 at 50Mbps, which is something that broadcasters will accept. If Canon weren’t developing something like this they’d be mad, because it’s a wonderful opportunity for them to grab some territory back from Sony. If they get it right, I don’t see how they could possibly fail.”
