Admit it - there's a secret movie in your head. Maybe it's an animated version of that play you wrote in fifth grade. Maybe you dream of having your grandma tell her stories while you film the old pictures and neighborhoods.

It doesn't have to be just a dream anymore. With digital cameras and high-end computers growing cheaper by the day, filmmaking need no longer be relegated to the intensely financed, highly staffed Hollywood-based movie machine.

New Hampshire filmmakers Marc Vadeboncoeur and Bill Millios are offering "The Digital Filmmaking Workshop," an intensive program on May 6 and 7 that offers a how-to guide for the independent filmmaker.

Vadeboncoeur and Millios -who made the critically acclaimed 2005 movie Dangerous Crosswinds- aren't trying to sell filmmaking as a casual, diversions-on-a-boring-afternoon kind of thing.They are working to share their firsthand learning with aficionados who have a passion and interest in learning how to make a movie.

"Even 10 years ago, plenty of people were making quality productions, but the differences in equipment between what independent people could afford and what professionals could afford - it showed up on screen," explainedVadeboncoeur. "You could have great ambition and style but you'd still have a movie made on an old-fashioned editing machine, and it was always recognizable. With advances today, the technology doesn't separate us anymore."

Vadeboncoeur says an investment of less than $10,000 can equip a person with the minimal (if used) equipment necessary to shoot a digital film. That includes a camera and a high-speed computer capable of digital editing.

But having relatively pricey equipment does not a filmmaker make. That's where the digital filmmaking workshop comes in.

"The basic tools are affordable but if you don't know how to use those tools to their full potential you can still end up producing what looks like home movies,"said Vadeboncouer. "There are tricks with the equipment - and when you know the tricks, you get the quality."

Having been through the process themselves, the two filmmakers know that only about 5 percent of the film business involves the actual shooting of the movie.

"We are stressing the planning - that you need to think of this whole thing as a business enterprise," said Vadeboncoeur. "That means you work things out ahead of time, you get yourself liability insurance, you figure out whether you can pay your actors or whether you're going to give them a percentage of earnings if the film happens to get picked up for distribution, you have a lawyer on retainer just in case."

A filmmaker since 1990, Vadeboncoeur has worked for a variety of clients and media outlets. He has done film work for the city of Manchester and the Miss New Hampshire Scholarship Program.

Bill Millios has produced several independent feature-length films, including 1997's Old Man Dogs, a treatise on nature, relationships and the afterlife.

In 1995, Millios and Vadenboncoeur made Dangerous Crosswinds, a film that wrestles with euthanasia and is populated with New Hampshire characters who honor the Yankee spirit. The movie was shot in the Granite State and screened throughout New Hampshire (getting press and public interest is also a part of the workshop, Vadeboncoeur says,) including Concord's Capitol Center for the Arts and Manchester's Palace Theatre.

Millios is currently at work writing the script for a Crosswinds follow-up.

Vadeboncoeur hopes the digital workshop will be invaluable for anybody who - not unlike him -was directing even before he could drive a car.

"I didn't have my own 8-millimeter camera but I had friends who did, and somewhere, in a basement, there's a bit of movie I made when I was 10 years old,"he said. "Then, it came time to do it for real."

By VICTORIA SHOULDIS

For the Monitor (next page »)