While technically not a digital movie, “The Blair Witch Project,” which was shot primarily on a $500 Hi-8 mm consumer video camera purchased at Circuit City for the production (and then returned before the 30-day return period had expired), merits special emphasis because the model utilized by the Orlando based movie makers applies so readily to the indie digital moviemaking philosophy.  “Blair Witch,” a horror “documentary” about footage left by student filmmakers who reportedly vanished in the woods while making a documentary about a legendary witch, and created by Haxan Films consisting of writer-directors Dan Myrick and Edwardo Sanchez, and producers Rob Cowie, Gregg Hale, and Mike Monello, was discovered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, picked up on a pre-emptive opening night bid by Artisan Entertainment, and went on to screen at this year’s Directors Fortnight in Cannes where it won the prestigious Prix de Jeunesse Award (Best First Film).

Produced and blown-up to 35mm reportedly at a total cost of less than $60,000, “Blair Witch” leaped into the mainstream when the picture garnered a rave review from Roger Ebert, who wrote this past May that the movie “is already the third most talked about film of the summer after ‘The Phantom Menace’ and ‘Eyes Wide Shut,’ and may move into second place by mid-June.” In an uncommon embrace for such an out-of-left-field film, “Blair Witch has won  high praise from such mainstream publications as The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Premiere Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, and the LA Weekly, all several weeks in advance of the July 16 release date.

The Blair Witch creators developed a new form of narrative story telling, experimenting by using segments of the celebrated DOGMA 95 digital paradigm and allowing the actors playing the roles of the students to hold the camera and shoot the movie themselves while improvising and working off the treatment written by Myrick and Sanchez and following the director’s notes which were furnished to them.  The tension, drama, and horror created in the movie was provided in part by the directors’ late-night unexpected visits to the actor’s campsites, who were left in the woods to fend for themselves during the eight- day, real time chronological shooting period, for the express purpose of scaring them to death.   The production design consisted only of natural materials -- sticks and vine-like twine, for instance -- left by the filmmakers and found by the actors in the woods over the course of the shoot.

The moviemakers started with 20 hours of raw footage, edited that down to 8 hours of material that worked, and finally after a year of editing, manipulated the work down to its current feature length version.  The movie was designed specifically, creatively, and for budgetary reasons to logically have a “video” look as the filmmakers could not afford to shoot and process 20 hours of footage on 16 mm or 35 mm film.  Utilizing these techniques, a moviemaker could certainly design a project to be shot in a similar manner in a 100% digital format. Certainly “Blair Witch,” perhaps more than any of the rags-to-riches indie success stories of the last ten years, proves that all a digital moviemaker does need to succeed is an ingenious concept, and the ability to execute it well.

“Blair Witch” is scheduled to open this summer opposite “Eyes Wide Shut” in approximately 10 major US cities and is expected to rapidly open wider to about 400 screens.