Action!: Professor Know-It-All's Illustrated Guide to Film & Video Making (DIY) Paperback – September 26, 2012

My students love this book. It makes some of the technical aspects of filmmaking seem less scary. Super smart, cute, and informative. Just a note, it goes into motion picture film a lot, so if you want something primarily focus on video, then this isn't it. That said, introductory video techniques are almost never as coherent and entertaining as this is.

Updated review:Looks like the Kindle version of this book was fixed and is good now!Original review:T̶h̶e̶r̶e̶'s̶ l̶i̶t̶e̶r̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ w̶o̶r̶d̶s̶ m̶i̶s̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ r̶a̶n̶d̶o̶m̶l̶y̶ i̶n̶ t̶h̶e̶ k̶i̶n̶d̶l̶e̶ v̶e̶r̶s̶i̶o̶n̶ o̶f̶ t̶h̶i̶s̶ b̶o̶o̶k̶ t̶h̶a̶t̶ a̶r̶e̶n̶'t̶ m̶i̶s̶s̶i̶n̶g̶ f̶r̶o̶m̶ t̶h̶e̶ p̶r̶i̶n̶t̶ v̶e̶r̶s̶i̶o̶n̶. T̶h̶e̶y̶ a̶l̶s̶o̶ d̶o̶n̶'t̶ h̶a̶v̶e̶ a̶n̶y̶ p̶a̶g̶e̶ n̶u̶m̶b̶e̶r̶s̶ o̶n̶ t̶h̶e̶ k̶i̶n̶d̶l̶e̶.

Excellent book for learning about cameras and getting great shots. Easy to read and understand.

I assume, based on the other good reviews for the paper version of this book, that the Kindle version was created via scanning and optical character recognition. The book is peppered with random word substitutions where the OCR software guessed wrong about what it read. Stumbling over glitches like "grey cars" (grey card), "150 50" (ISO 50) and "do the match" (do the math) makes the book very hard to read.Also, be aware that this book is written at about a fifth-grade level, with lots of cutsey (and primitive) drawings of things like lenses with smiling faces. Sort of like the kind of thing you'd use to explain to your seven-year-old what daddy does with his camera.

Great item!

Great little book, very quick to read and a great reference to making interesting and better videos.

I read this book in my intro to video class. It's so fun, the students love it.

Hands down, the best introductory handbook for film/video students. Hilarious and smart. Should be taught in every film program in the world.