Once you have made a micro short film or two, you start to develop a way of seeing and a way of doing that lets you perceive an opportunity to address a particular theme in a quick, easy to shoot manner. The attitudes and practices I cover in my book, Micro Short Filmmaking: A guided learning journey and in my training workshops enable you to spot a filmable situation, marry it to a particular passion theme and narrative of yours, and bundle it up into a completed film in a few days.

When you become practiced at pulling together micro shorts, it is only a matter of time until you start to consider stringing a bunch of them together into a larger work. This isn’t a new idea, but it is a great one. So-called “framed tales,” for example, have been done in literature for ages. An example is Dubliners, by James Joyce, where several stories in a collection share elements of place, character and themes. The same can be done with micro shorts, particularly if you start with the intention of embedding them into a larger work.

If you write to include embedded micro shorts in your storytelling, it gives you an instant increase of control over the ultimate outcome of your project. If, for example, half of your larger film can be told by embedding micro short films into it, and you already know how to shoot a micro film yourself, you know right away you will be able to film half the film yourself. This a lot stronger position to be in than needing to wait for other talent, gear or money to come your way. The frame of the overall film just becomes a series of segments that you can start grabbing today.

To do this, you will want to have a really clear layout of the entire narrative, from beginning to end. One of the best ways to do this is to start building your timeline in your editing software as soon as you have the script finished to your satisfaction. Start with the obvious, the beginning and end titles, and block out an appropriate space between the two for the rest of the film. By this point, you should at least also have a clear sense of the first and last shots of the film, and ideally most everything in between. Figure out what parts of the film can be told with an embedded micro short. You may want to try using my swipescaping technique for some segments. 

If you are using voiceover narrative for some of your embedded micro short segments, you can actually start recording those now, and find the appropriate video imagery later. This lets you populate your timeline with proper length audio clips, in the right order, and also tells you how much video footage you need to acquire to marry with the audio portion of each segment. The end result of starting this process is that you end up with a clearly thought-out shopping list in your mind for what footage you need. For example, if you need 85 seconds of a street scene, you can be wandering around with your smartphone or other camera, ready to grab that footage when you see it.

To experiment with this technique, why not try a short film, say 6 minutes, half of which could be made up from standalone one-minute micro shorts? Or some variation of that formula? Give it a try, and start gathering your imagery today. Grab a copy of my book if you would like some encouragement and guidance in making micro shorts, or take a class with me. Don’t forget to bring your camera, and have fun!   

This summer, we shot a feature film that was made using 2 different camera platforms, a bigger more traditionally cinematic camera, and an iPhone 5. In general, my experience up till then had been along the lines of “bigger cameras for bigger films and smaller cameras for smaller films.” In pairing up big and small cameras on the shoot of “It’s About Love” I was eager to move both camera sizes into parity on a bigger, more complex film.

There is a ton that I love about working with small cameras, and the next 3 films I am in pre-production on will be shot with an iPhone 6S+ as the main camera. It’s true that the 6S+ takes a big jump in terms of its videography abilities (like 4K resolution capture), but mostly I find that pocketable cinema cameras have some undeniably fun and powerful capabilities that lend themselves to making films of any size and scale. Here are a few things I love about working with little cameras:

1. You always have them with you. Some of my favourite films I have made have been shot on impulse, including many of my micro shorts. You can’t shoot stuff spontaneously without a camera, and always having one with you actually changes how you see the world around you. By being alert to filmable moments, you only have to reach in your pocket to capture them.
2. They are mobile and let you get in close to actors without being obtrusive. Yes, you can do this with bigger cameras, but there’s nothing like a little camera to let you float around in the scene like a butterfly, and change your shot based on instinct. A film like "Tangerine" shows how you can bring an audience right into the scene, by nimbly capturing what is happening in the moment.
3. They allow for new techniques, like “swipescaping” which is a term I coined to describe journeying through an arrangement of static objects with a small camera in ways that can support a narrative spine for a scene. I used this to good effect in the film “Deathbed Regrets.” Again, there’s nothing revolutionary about this except that a small camera lets you do it right here, right now.
4. You can bulk up a little camera with big camera accessories. While I resist this for all the reasons above, you can in fact make a big camera out of a little one if there is a valid cinematic reason to do so. There is a growing world of accessories like lenses, rigs, external mikes and other goodies that can make your smartphone look and feel like a big cinema camera. Just don’t start forgetting your camera at home, because you’ve left it embedded in all that bigger heavier gear! The camera that’s with you is the camera that shoots.

So those are a few of the things I love about shooting with little cameras. How about you? Feel free to weigh in with your own thoughts and tips. But in the meantime, go make a movie!