My wife and I just finished watching Invasion, a movie unlike anything we have seen before. Invasion, directed by Albert Pyun and starring Virginia Dare, Scott Paulin, and Don Keith Opper, takes place on the night of May 19th, 2004 in the town of Lawton, California and deals with a meteorite-carried plague that infests the town. Though this may sound like a typical space zombie film, it is not. What makes it unique and thoroughly enjoyable is the use of a dash-mounted HD video camera which is to great effect in creating the creepiest atmosphere we have ever seen. The key is the fact that you experience a one-hour-plus continuous, uncut scene, which is only possible because of the nature of video cameras.
In a typical film camera, scene length is limited to the amount of film you can load into the camera. Typically, this ranges around 8 to 12 minutes depending on frame speed, and film size. Now, that is the maximum scene, which was used to great effect by Hitchcock in "Rope" where the film was shot in ten takes ranging from a little over four minutes to a little over ten minutes.
Today, those film limitations have been eliminated through the use of digital storage. MiniDV tapes allow you to shoot a continuous, one-hour, shot in standard-def, or you can store directly to hard drive or solid-state drive if you are shooting high-def.
The director Invasion uses the power of digital storage by shooting the film primarily in one hour-long, continuous scene shot from the dashboard of a police car as it moves through a secluded park in the middle of the night. Since the camera is "bolted" to the dashboard, your only viewpoint is out through the front window. Since it is night, your depth of vision ends at the end of the cruiser's spotlight. Occasionally, a video link with the police station shows up as a b/w picture-in-picture insert in the video feed, but for the most part the story is told in the style of an old-time radio (OTR) drama, i.e. through dialog.
I cannot describe how powerful this form of filmmaking is, especially to someone like myself, who is very used to listening to OTR dramas and podcasts. Even as I listened intently to the dialog, I found myself peering into the dark past the end of the spotlight, looking for something just beyond the edge of the beam.
Now think about filmmaking not in terms of scenes and acts, but as one continuous visual scene with a start, middle and end. Think about a screenplay that makes far more use of dialog then visuals. Think about principle filming could be done in a day? Put it all together and you have a film that follows a very unique paradigm that merges the old "film the train coming into the station" with virtually unlimited shot length.
I recommend anyone interested in filmmaking watch Invasion and think about how one can use the storage capabilities of today's HD cameras (or even SD cameras) to shift the filmmaking paradigm.
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