How to record your story? Camera

2) the camera -- lenses, exposure, framing, angles, movement, supports, lighting, hard drives, monitors

Feature story telling is a visual medium, first.

I will spend very little time on the techie side of this camera v. that camera.  There are certain challenges working with a fixed focal length lens which is currently the case with most cell phone cameras -- digital zoom and add on lenses don't count -- I've used both, to very limited usable results.  Also auto exposure and auto focus are awesome sometimes and awful at others.

But there are hardware/software solutions on the horizon: The Light camera, and new, beyond 2-D possibilities: The Lytro 360 camera. 

The point being, many of these techie issues will go away, even on a budget of $4k.  If you are relying on technology to save your project, use the $4k you have to go on vacation.

I shot my project at 1080HD almost exclusively, even though I could have recorded at higher resolutions -- more on that later.

There are some very hard facts about what happens when you do a Fourier transform on reality, the result being a two-dimensional sequence of images your eyes mistake for continuous and your emotions mistake for reality.

For example, as to lenses on Holiday, I'll get into why about 25% of the shots are wide angle:

 about 74 % were medium shots:

and about 1% long shots:

Of course, no matter how good your lenses are, your lighting is critical.  More on all this later.