Oscar who?

“So the shot opens from the street where you focus on the gallows from the left,” the director tells me. “Then I want you to circle around the left side, lower the camera to the ground and come from under the gallows, where you’ll point the camera up through the open trap door to do a closeup on the hangman’s face.”

“What?” I respond. “I’m supposed to keep a handheld camera steady while I crawl across the grass, climb up through the structure of the gallows, aim through the hole and pull focus? All without a cut?”

WE’RE MAKING a movie, my son James and I, and about a dozen of our close friends. It’s a low-budget (make that a no-budget) short film about a hanging. We hope it wins an Oscar but right now we’re in pre-production, planning the shots necessary to cover the action so we’ll have the footage we need to edit the story.

No, we don’t know what we’re doing — that’s why we’re doing it. Or maybe better said, we’re doing it despite the fact that we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s kind of the Montana way: Never be deterred from your dreams by a lack of experience or credentials.

James, the director, is a theater major. I’m a theater dilettante. And having experienced several years in live theater, we’re trying our hands at film or, actually, video which is about as close to film as it gets these days.

It’s an interesting transition from live theater to film. Live theater has an art and a technology. But the technology can be really minimal, allowing everyone to concentrate on the art. Although you can get somewhat creative with the lighting of live theater, generally if you can see the actors the light is OK. And sound? Tell the actors to speak loudly and “project.” That pretty well covers it.

Not so with a movie.

Start with a camera. Worry about the frame rate, the bit rate, the dynamic range, the focal length, the codec, the platform, the stabilizer. And then there’s the sound. And the light — got to get the color right. What, there are holes in the spectrum of my Snap-On work lights? My RGB parade is out of whack?

In live theater I found it pretty easy to stay grounded in reality. The technology was what came with the venue, the script was right out of the catalog and the community theater company I worked with included any number of people who had done it all before.

But in film, the sky is the limit. It’s almost beyond belief what you can spend for a cinema camera. That $40,000 Red camera? It’s just a step above amateur. And then you need the lenses, the lights, the dollies and the crane.

The crane? Somewhere, reality takes hold again. “OK, I’m not James Cameron.” And neither is my son. And the odd thing about cameras is that, regardless of all the options available in the top-end equipment, the limited video options available in my Nikon SLR quite nicely cover my needs for this first film (or at least my needs as I currently understand them).

A crane? How about three big casters on a piece of plywood under my tripod? Now we’re getting back to reality.

Oh, and you won’t believe what I found at a rummage sale last weekend: A Nikon 50 mm F/1.4 lens with a case that I remembered from when it came out 50 years ago. It was the lens the real photographers had. The lens that cost three times what my whole camera was worth. The Ferrari of lenses that I dreamed I might own one day.

And now I do. For my cinematographic needs, it’s perfect. It’s completely manual, and it’s built to be operated by a human rather than an electronic interface. And it cost me three dollars.

George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron? They’re dreamers. They dreamed big about what might be and then they made it happen. My dreams are much smaller. I just want to tell my story in a clear, compelling manner, and to make good use of my limited equipment, my developing skill and the talent that surrounds me.

And to win that Oscar.

David Vale retired from the world of psychology and statistics and now owns the Pocketstone Cafe in Bigfork. Somehow he thinks he has time for a career in the movies.