Ok, here's just one opinion... You might hear many others.

Hire a camera person who's got their own kit and knows how to use it. Hire a sound person who's got their own kit. Hire an editor with software. Watch what they do, and consider it an on-the-job film course.

Don't forget to budget for locations, costumes, props, and also behind-the-scenes stuff like food for crew, accommodation, transport.

Anything you save you can put towards the next production.

The difference between beginner and professional is knowledge. Professionals aren't going to shoot in portrait mode :). Professionals will use microphones and tripods. Professionals will nail focus, will expose faces properly, will make minimal continuity mistakes, and will only cross the 180 line on purpose.

The short film at the end of JJ Abrams' Super 8 is a sort of homage to beginner mistakes. :)

But amateur vs professional is different from beginner vs professional. The amateur might have just as much knowledge as the professional.

What they don't have is money and time.

The reason that steadicams, slow motion, aerial shots, point of view shots used to make images look professional is that amateurs didn't have access to the gear or the software. But now they do. A slider shot in 2016 looks less professional than it did in 2010. An explosion in 2016 looks less professional than in 2010, seeing that you can now automatically comp one into your 4K iPhone footage with an app.

So, the difference is greyer than it used to be.

But there are still levels of production value that are beyond amateurs. Amateurs don't have the luxury of time to spend a day shooting one page of a script. Amateurs can't pay for an army of extras. Amateurs are stuck with limited casts, limited locations (often house interiors), limited costumes (so, they're generally going to have scripts set in the contemporary world).

BUT this is not to say that professional work is "better" than amateur work. I don't like episodes 1-3 of Star Wars. I think the storylines, dialogue and acting are crap. There's many YouTube web series I'd rather spend my time watching. But I wouldn't doubt that the former is "professional" and the latter aren't.

I actually really liked the camera work in the Malick parody :)

Re the Nolan parody, the thing is: is it more an Inception parody than a Nolan parody? Did it really pick up trademarks of his style?

Wanted to add one more thought: for drama, you CAN get by with just one shotgun microphone (say, a Rode NTG1) and a boom pole and running the sound into the camera. Don't need a hypercardioid, don't need lavs, don't need external recorder. It's not ideal, and the sound guy won't be able to ride the levels, for example, but it can work. I've worked on a no budget film where that was the setup. I would suggest both lav mics and a shotgun/hypercardioid though, for the sake of backup.

For what it's worth, I work with a c100 on a daily basis, and I haven't seen much of a difference between recording to an Atomos Ninja and recording to SD. I haven't done any extensive tests. I haven't viewed on big screens. Mostly, all I do notice is much, much bigger file sizes, and clunkier and longer editing/processing/rendering. From memory, I think you do see slightly more detail in both highlights and darks when recording uncompressed, but only in a way that's there when you're pixel peeping and looking for it. So, I just record internally instead.

This is what I believe (but I hope someone more knowledgeable will chime in): when you record to 10 bit 422 or whatever, the image is still 8 bit. It's limited by the processor. There might be more flexibility in pushing around the grade in post, but you're not going to see immediate differences. In theory, there will be fewer compression artefacts, but, to be honest, I very rarely notice compression artifacts in ordinary footage anyway.

For feature films, I don't think there are quality guidelines you need to meet in terms of acquisition. So, yep, you could shoot on a smartphone.

For television, some networks do have guidelines. For instance, certain resolutions or bit rates.

For corporate interviews type stuff, bring a camera that looks like a camera and charge accordingly.