The Camera:

The plan: make a movie for 10,000 dollars. That’s 10,000 Australian dollars, which equates to around 20 American dollars, what with the current world economy. When I set out to make a fool of myself movie, there was no economic crisis. Everything was sweet, the banks gave me the money. Hell, they were throwing gobs of cash away at anyone who would take it. I was one of those idiots. I gladly took it. The only thing I had to worry about was flitting away the money on Mars Bars, Hookers and DVD’s. Now with the economic hideousness in full effect I feel almost irresponsible spending the money on the movie… But…

Fuck it.

That flippant comment said, I recently delved deep into the heady world of spending money that wasn’t mine. I bought the first piece of kit for the flick. The camera. There are two ways I could do this movie. One, hire a nice Sony Z1 (the camera used for the first couple of Mythbuster seasons among many, many others) for a total of one week and make the movie. The guys that made “The Castle” made it in a week. The second option was to buy a camera and take my sweet time making this bad boy right. The choice was easy. I would have been crazy to try to shoot this thing in a week. The cast and crew of “The Castle” was filled to the brim with professionals and all I have is a handful of talented friends and me. And up until yesterday I thought the word “Flatulent” was the scientific name for a certain type of Grasshopper.

After the decision was made, the next few weeks was spent fondling Google for the answers I sorely desired as well as hitting forums and speaking with people who were in the know with this sort of thing. In the end it was my Dad who mentioned he found something that might fit the requirements. Soon after he sent me some links and I read up some more. It sounded good. I hit Vimeo and started checking out demo footage. It looked good. The best part of all the price was right. After a few more days of shopping around I had taken a leap of faith and blindly dumped a couple of grand into the bank account of some New Zealand online camera store. Hoping for the best I played the waiting game. Soon the camera arrived and I was happier than a pig in sh… Mud.

Pertinent Information:

- The camera was bought from globalmediapro.com (Note: that even though you will pay into an Australian bank account any equipment bought from these guys will be an import subject to the standard duties/taxes and customs fees)

- To read the camera specs hit here.