Home Movies
Renovating the Home Motion Picture
Written by Graeme Cole for Unfound Peoples Videotechnic.
A set of ten microessays on tools and techniques the home moviemaker has repurposed or invented that other filmmakers have ignored.
The home moviemaker is free. Most home moviemakers are free even of the awareness that they’re making home movies. Videoing a squirrel or filming the fireworks.
And so, the home moviemaker devises or defaults to improvised creative and technical methods. Often without conscious thought or self-criticality. Techniques of stunning aesthetic, emotional, and mediaphysical originality and potential.
Here’s a much, much closer look at some of those techniques - and how the amateur, the indie filmmaker, or the seasoned Hollywood pro might integrate them into their practice.
Evergreen, esoteric knowledge, originally published in the autumn of 2024.
Read in any order.
Index
◡◶▿ HOME01 | A blueprint for the filmmaker’s inner studio
🏠 Home represents both a physical and emotional space - for better or worse.
🍼 Gaston Bachelard highlighted the home as both primal “bosom” and a kind of Tupperware of time.
🫣 The home moviemaker wields embarrassment like a set of hyper-enthusiastic Fresnel lights.
🫂 Before you learn how to see, you must learn how to hug.
◡◶▿ HOME02 | “Junior playing with his toads... in SPACE!”
📍 The amateur filmmaker may hide her location, but not her localness.
💡 The stubborn habits of the filmmaker and her neighbours make for unique and inimitable production values.
📽️ Jia Zhangke identified the future of cinema in these local folds.
📺 The Hollywood movie becomes a local phenomenon the moment it lands on your television set.
◡◶▿ HOME03 | Shootouts with friends
💥 Two titans of the moving image avant-garde made a home action movie together.
🍿 The result is a playful thrill - and a masterclass in both the blockbuster shootout sequence and the giddy home movie.
🫂 Elements of embarrassment, capture, and bold being and doing hark back to our understanding of the home movie as smothering bosom.
🖼️ Our Bolex-wielding heroes rewired their filmmaking muscle memory in a tangled tendril of art and life.
◡◶▿ HOME04 | Notches
💇 The cuts and omissions of the diary film may be their most eloquent parts.
🤳 A moment in Joseph Morder’s phone camera diary highlighted the worlds that live beneath the video stream.
🧟 The film diarist is a “Frankenstein of meat and machine, vanity, sorrow, denial, base instinct, learned grammars, and mediaphysical proprioception,” and
🚧 By putting her life on screen, the film diarist confronts the reality of her existential punctuation marks.
◡◶▿ HOME05 | Shorter, bolder, stranger, clippier
🏋️ The Super 8 camera is an essential home workout device for today’s digital filmmaker.
⛓️ The pressures of the format tend to result in an open-ended accumulation of short, intense shots - the undiluted orange squash of (a) life.
🏁 The Super 8 filmmaker is thrown off this rhythm as she spots the end of the 50-foot reel approaching.
🧩 She must consider her découpage on the fly - and across overlapping dimensions.
◡◶▿ HOME06 | A phenomenology of the pinch zoom
💁♀️ Filmmaking just for the thrill of caressing a touch-sensitive screen can be just as thrilling for the audience, as long as they’re there when you’re doing it.
👀 The pinch zoom is a highly personal camera move because it combines the fingerprint, the hand gait, and the crackle of the mind in action.
🆘 The pinch zoom is an “emergency close-up button” and a new tool for a cyborg movie culture.
🔍 The pinch zoom’s unique manner of magnifying or revealing makes it uniquely valuable to the home moviemaker.
◡◶▿ HOME07 | Frame work
🍰 Since the home movie is a slice of your life, you’d better slice carefully.
🏡 The home movie genre is framed by homey themes - but the filmmaker must frame the actual shots herself.
🔭 Common framing methods range from the handheld to the window ledge-leaned to the hubris of the consumer-grade tripod.
🫨 Each method has its quirks and flaws - thank goodness!
◡◶▿ HOME08 | Hobby horses
🛠️ The hobbyist consumes and is consumed by the accoutrements of her hobby.
🎥 The hobbyist filmmaker may forget about “content” altogether in the quest for oneness with her tools.
🧪 Gustav Deutsch and Carolee Schneemann reconceptualised their home movie framing methods using a phantom dolly, a cat, and acid.
🏗️ Tony Hill’s camera rigs are more elaborate than most high-end set-ups - but he’s a hobbyist, dammit. And a home moviemaker!
◡◶▿ HOME09 | Set & sequence
🥱 It’s hard keeping the home movie fresh when the sound stage of your life gets stale.
🗂️ One way to look at your home footage anew is to remove the chronology and order your clips by category.
🏠 Peter Greenaway’s category of choice? The letter “H.”
🏖️ Meanwhile, Gustav Deutsch attempted to order everybody’s footage by category - and lost the home movies’ homeliness altogether!
◡◶▿ HOME10 | The beating bosom
😶 The silent home movie is the most intimate of the home movie forms.
🫂 The filmmaker can use silence to expand the contents of the home movie and its audience towards and into each other.
🎥 The effect is not the same in a Hollywood silent, which is far too vain and cultivated to admit true intimacy.
🫶 The silent home moviemaker makes a collaborator of both cast and audience - but at the cost of one precious detail.
Bonus:
◡◶▿ Home moviemakers and Hollywood titans exchange tips (hypothetically)
📽️ A prepatory anecdote and summary of the Renovating the Home Motion Picture program.
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◡◶▿ AMAT10 | Home
🐿️ Four microessays and an exercise on home moviemaking from our Advanced Amateury program.
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