Hi all!

Well I am a bit of an odd fish in the world of DV. I don't actually own any video gear or anything, but I would like to soon purchase some. I have done a bit of "filming" with some friends of mine (we are all young university students), we have a small analogue cam and a cheap tripod, and are going to try and make a cheap "Steadicam JR", we also have a good mic, and custom cable for it. Its hard for us to make anything look good as we cant really get 24fps or have good 16:9 format. I would like to eventually get into filming things more as a hobby for my own interest and/or things like weddings, making documentaries for local groups and that sort of thing. I am a bit of a gear head, so I like the gear slightly more than writing films and directing them. :-)

Weirdly enough, I am soon going to be starting a job at a post production house in my city. I will be working with the computer gear (SGI) which is the area I have trained for (going to graduate in a few weeks) and is my main obsession in life. They are the sister company to the main film division, which does TV ads, and some major film work. They also team up with Weta on occasion, which is the company doing the Lord Of the Rings trilogies. So I will try and learn as much as possible from the guys in the film cam division.

I would like to soon purchase a Canon XL1s, and a Glidecam 4000 PRO (or similar). The one thing that makes it hard for me to afford gear like that is New Zealand's poor dolour. For example if I wanted to buy something from he US that cost USD$10 I would have to spend NZD$24 on it! That makes anything expensive! So any tips for saving money on gear would be greatly appreciated. Especially as I am only a poor student. :-)

I would also like to shoot some dance stuff (like Chris), because a good friend of mine is studying ballet and contemporary dance. I have seen some footage of a famous contemporary dance, with a Steadicam, and it looked almost surreal, absolutely amazing. Great creative potential. So I hope to do some work with her once I have the gear.

Well that's enough from me.

Thanks for the great site!

Cheers!

Hello

I know in this day and age it is hard to trust people. But in school you can find people that you can trust and maybe get them to buy your things and send them to you. If not work hard bite the bullet and buy what you can afford and upgrade ASAP.

Emory

Dude. Emory.

Mark's post was from 8 years ago! Unless something very very bad happened, i reckon he's well past graduation.

Interestingly, the NZ dollar is crazy high against the US dollar. Soon my u.s. mates will be asking me to mail THEM gear. ha.

Shout out to any kiwis out there. Throw me a line if you are around CHCH.

cheers,
-a

Hahaha. I hadn't noticed even notice the 8 year difference until I read Andrew's post. Now I'm tempted to post something here 8 years from now, but I'll probably forget. :/