What is the difference between an AV and a film?

[TimStannard]

These discussions rear their ugly head from time to time and people can get all het up about it, often out of all proportion. But that's not surprising. We do become unreasonably irate about things about which we are passionate. Sometimes things change as a result, sometimes the same old arcuments crop up for a while, nothing happens and they drop below the radar for a while before raising their heads again. Very often, other advances in culture or technology occurs which render the argument meaningless.

Nevertheless, picking up onb a couple of points. When making films for our own amusement or for showing to friends or for international distribution, "rules" about whether it's a film or an AV are irrelevant. But Howard is absolutely right. If we have competitions we need to set out the parameters of that competition. If we have a rule that an AV can have no more than a fixed percentage of moving image, does this mean we should have a similar rule that a film should have no LESS than a certain amount of moving image? I'm sure I dont know.

And Dave, you're right- the "archive footage" argument is a perfect example of something that rears its head from time to time. Whilst "so long as it's a good story, I don't care" is a perfectly reasonable attitude ("content is king" and all that), I think there still have to be rules if we are having a specific competition and naturally those rules need to identify what is and what is not acceptable.

Suppose I have an idea for a documentary. I write the script and record a voiceover. Lets suppose the subject matter is such that I could feasibly shoot the material myself, but choose to use entirely stock footage? It will almost certainly result in a film that looks far better than if I'd shot the footage myself.

Is that a legitimate entry? I'd argue not. One might argue that the footage, even if available for free, was originally shot by someone for which payment was received (and how we go about validating that, Heaven only knows) and therefore it is excluded under the "professional services" criteria. But if we o that, it excludes people from using just a bit of stock footage here and there that they couldn't have access to shoot.

Of course no-one bats an eyelid that most of us regularly use professionally written and recorded music, though presumably if someone is paid to write a score for a film, that film would be excluded?

I'm not suggesting any answers.