Below, I will embed a twenty minute short into this post. The short is by Stu Maschwitz, author of ‘The DV Rebel’s Guide‘.

The DV Rebel’s Guide is a comprehensive guidebook to planning, shooting, and finishing your own digital movie.

Stu works in the visual effects industry in Hollywood and has a fairly impressive list of credits to his name, including Star Wars, Sin City and Superman Returns - his involvement in the latter two being through his company ‘The Orphanage‘.

He says himself his day job is directing commercials, and you can watch his showreel on the Orphanage website, which includes one I recognised where a woman driving a toy VW Polo is chased by a cat… remember that one?

Oh, and he’s also responsible for developing ‘Magic Bullet‘ - a colour correction system which makes Digital Video look more like film.

He also has a fairly active and interesting blog worth checking out.

But the really impressive thing about Stu and his book is the fact that the proof is in the pudding. The film embedded below ‘The Last Birthday Card’ is a showcase for Stu’s skills, which his book will attempt to impart to you. The film is about two hitmen and features shoot outs, helicopter attacks and car crashes.

Is it a good film? Hell no. It’s terrible.

But he made it for $5,000. That’s pretty impressive and shows he obviously knows his stuff - whether his book can teach you his tricks I can’t say, not having read it, but Robert Rodriguez seems impressed, he says:

I’d been wanting to write a book for the new breed of digital filmmakers, but now I don’t have to. My pal and fellow movie maker Stu Maschwitz has compressed years of experience into this thorough guide. Don’t make a movie without reading this book!

Any filmmakers out there read this book? Find it good? Please comment!