Indie Entertainment – Production Hardware Summary

Up to now we’ve looked at DSLR shooting, as well as the next wave of camera equipment coming out. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as we could get into the wide world of lenses, monitors, lighting equipment, stabilizers and stands, and on it goes to no end.

Some of the numbers we’ve looked at start to add up pretty quickly. But I really want to emphasize that you do not need to have the latest and greatest to produce things that people will love to watch and subscribe to.

In the very very beginning, I shot with a Lumix quick-pix style camera. It cost me $180 in Chinatown. Of course, the images it made were not very good, but I didn’t know much then and it got me started. If you don’t have funds, you can still almost always get hold of some kind of camera to shoot with. And with training, you can “fool” your audience into thinking you’re shooting on something much higher-end than you really are. This is because much of good video has to do with learning lighting and solid camera moves, along with good framing and narrative.

When I wanted to step up, I picked up a camera that allowed me to shoot in high-def, at 1080P. It was the Canon Vixia HF 100, and even to this day it has it’s uses for me. It’s tiny, has decent audio, and in the right lighting can produce a good-looking image. The battery lasts forever and I can have it shoot all day long unattended. Best of all, I was able to purchase two of them for less than the price of a single high-end camera and teach myself multi-cam shooting and editing techniques. Twice the number of people in the studio could shoot without having to wait for an available camera, so we learned faster.

Fixed and Growth Mindset

There is a school of thought that says people fall into two camps. They are either of a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. It is my experience that these two mindsets will determine how well you do in producing entertainment content for self-publishing as an indie. The fixed mindset is based on the idea that people are born good at some things and bad at others. For that person, there is very little reason to shoot on anything less than the best equipment because they either have an ability or they don’t.

But with a growth mindset, you’ll tend to shoot on anything because you know that every bit of experience helps you grow and your need is to accumulate experience. In that circumstance, sure you’d love the new 4K camera, but if what you have is an $800 consumer cam, you’ll shoot with it and experiment. And chances are you’ll wind up making something that somebody, somewhere, will appreciate.

When you have a growth mindset and you put your work up for others to see, you tend to take the feedback that you get in stride and use it to get better. But with a fixed mindset, if you put up work and people don’t like it, it is all too easy to decide that perhaps you don’t have this particular skill after all and give up.

The most valuable thing you can do as an indie is to forget about perfection, and make it your goal to gain as much experience as possible in the shortest period of time. And along the way, you must be putting your work up in front of others and gathering feedback. All of this is part of the growth journey, and it a path that should not be walked alone. So grab a camera, get some friends together, make a plan and go out and shoot!

Let’s take a look at some examples of people who have done that very thing and are out there right now proving that this approach can be very successful.