Luciferjones

My ongoing research into digital cinema aesthetics and the visual language evolutions brought about by technological shifts is now finding its way into solid written form. But whilst academic frameworks may force me into old-school paper and print there seemed no reason not to explore and present some of the thesis ideas in a new media format. So what will be presented here over coming months are work-in-progress podcasts looking at progressive chapter extracts.

Part1, entitled Cinematic Problematic sets off by seeking to understand the core pillars of cinematic thinking - mise en scene and montage - and poke a theoretical stick at them to see where the cracks are in the context of digital cinema.

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There are inherent problems in the way we think about, understand and even make cinema in the digital age and this is an area i’m persuing in a new book. Here’s some of those thouhgts in attempting to re-define cinema space.

“cinema, as we know it, is based upon lying to the viewer. perfect example is the construction of cinematic space.”- Lev Manovich

In all its forms, modes and manifestations cinema is a construction; an artificial built environment where communicative meaning is assembled through the leverage of tools, processes, mechanics and methodologies. Whether viewed from the perspective of experience, process, medium or entity; cinematic form is never divorced from the collaborative and inter-disciplinary notion of assembly. Of disparate pieces put into place and meaning derived from both the placement and the act of placing – placement in time and composition, placement in the frame, placement in perception and experience and, at the core of all these, a placement in space.

Of course, defining what that space is and considering how that space is understood, in both broad and holistically complex terms, is no simple task. In order to make that investigation in a meaningful way, one that ultimately provides a robust and flexible new theoretical framework for understanding the full extent of cinematic form in the twenty first century, we need to start with the axioms of what cinema is. Or, more importantly, what cinema has long been known and accepted to be. These axioms then become the tangible pillars at which we can hurl the stones of of new technologies, new modes of seeing and new concepts of media making like a techno-cultural Hajj.

Borge has commented that:

“It is quite feasible to produce a film without actors, but a film without a camera is a sheer impossibility. So the history of the film is to some extent the history of the camera, for it is the camera which actually takes the photograph, arranges all the separate shots in sequence, and which evokes the illusion of a live picture, an illusion which depends on the imperfection of the human eye.“(Börge, V. 1962)

Whilst this idea of cinema being inextricably linked to the camera as a physical and photographic-based apparatus is highly questionable in the current era (indeed this issue will be specifically dealt with in subsequent chapters) the concept of cinema being inextricable from mechanical and technical construction of illusion is certainly difficult to question. So what we have is a distinct techno-cultural form whereby technology and culture, mechanics and aesthetics, are conjoined – howwe make effecting whatwe make.. Similarly, whilst the visual and aural aesthetics of cinema may consistently vary and morph, the cinematic form itself remains rooted in technological components. What are the accepted techno-cultural pillars of cinema; those elements born of technology and technical process that dictate the cinematic experience?

There are essentially three key axioms that we might adopt from the outset from which to govern an understanding of the established and accepted modes of cinematic form as a technologically mediated process, experience and medium. These axioms are not gospel-like in their rigidity and the cannon of cinematic work is peppered with exceptions and fringe works that challenge such axioms. But they do, none the less, present, and are therefore useful as, guides for understanding the established patterns and dominant discourses of cinema; for it is these discourses that have served as the pillars for established cinematic theory over the past century – mise-en-scene, montage, the role of the viewer and the role of the maker are all built from their accepted norms.

Read the rest of this article here.

The history of cinema there have been an array of seminal moments that represent major turning points in the artform. Colour and Sound obviosuly strike as the most profound but there are others no less impactful but often far less obvious. The move to building and shaping cinematic form and moving images in 3D space represents such a shift.

In his work-in-progress essay series, Velvet Revolution (word DOC),  Lev Manovich regards the encompassing of 3D space into motion graphics tools as the driving element of a new visual language; “it offers a new method for representing physical reality… With 3D computer grapics we can represent three-dimensional structure of the world versus capturing only a perspectival image of the world, as in lens-based recording.”  Manovich sees 3D space compositing as influencing all media making “the way 3D computer animation organizes visual daya - as objects positioned in a Cartesian space - became the way to work with all moving image media.” All media objects - 2D, 3D, moving, still, animated and live action, can all occupy this singular space. In the context of the ‘frame’ which remains the base of cinematic composition, Manovich comments that “frame based representation did not dissapear - but it became simply recoded. An output format rather than the space the actual design is taking place… not simply a mechanical sum of the previously existing parts but a new species.”

What Manovich skirts around here is the impact on viewers and their aesthetic expectations. He speaks effectivly of Composition happening in 3D space but delivery (and by proxy utreception) still occupying a 2D space. Yet inevitably a sismic shift in the space of composition cannot help by profoundly impact aesthetics and in doing so change reception and viewership.

A comparative analogy might be seen in architecture - the flying buttress of gothic church design allowed for an architectural shift in the space of construction of buildings such as Notre Dame. The church was designed and ‘composed’ in a different conceptual space made possible by a shift in technology. The result however was not confined to the act of Composing, the space in which the composition took place, but also very much in the experience of that architectural space. The church building itself was still engaged in the same manner by the congreation, still idetified as a church, but the experience of that engagement, the shift in what was spatially possible for such a building, altered forever the expectation of what a building of that type could be and could do. And buildings were never the same again.

“There is a misconception we are surrendering something of art to a technology that will do it for us. That is never the case, Cinema IS technology.”
Francis Ford Coppola

Whilst this statement has irrefutably always been true the digital age has made the distinction between Cinema Technology and broader categories of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) distinctly vague and indeed arguably irrelevant.

Simply put, where once the tools and technology of cinema production were unique and specialized they are now largely one and the same with those of a broad category of ICT. Essentially the same technology tools and concepts used to create and distribute cinematic media are the same tools and concepts used to build databases, control systems and all manner of other products that have nothing to do with either cinema or art.

Any Editor worth their salt in the 21st century is as well versed in RAID storage, Local Area Networks (LAN) and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) as they are with EDL’s, Timecode and Video Formats.

With this in mind it stands to reason that the language by which we discuss, analyze and understand cinematic process has drawn ever closer, whether we want it to or not, to the common taxonomy and discourse of IT.

Whilst many who identify as Filmmakers or Artists will run away from this idea screaming in terror, I find I am drawn to the possibilities for re-defining what cinema is by shifting the language used to discuss and understand it.

- The rest of this article can be read here.

The Game Probe series explores the artistry of the video game; how they construct meaning, experience and story. Each episode focuses on a different game and examines how it works and what makes it an engaging and dramatic experience.

This episode looks at Company of Heroes, along with the Real Time Strategy genre, as a cinematic experience driven by the Player As Cinematographer.

You can view the rest of thes series on thinkingcinematic.blip.tv

Episode 3 in the Motion Sketches documentary series is now in the wild. This episode examines sound and the opportuntieis to embrace sound as part of the ‘writing’ process.

Cinema is an audio-visual experience and yet so often SOUND is not a part of the process of developing cinema. This episode looks at the importance of sound, writing sound and techniques for making the conception of sound a key part of your production process.

You can view all the Episodes in the Motion Sketches series at celtx.blip.tv

We don’t see the world any more as we once did…

Earthsim takes the GoogleEarth concept and drags it from what is effectively a glorified map into a complete virtual earth simulation. From the macro-level of the solar system and all the planets, down to the personal and intimate encounter at human-size on the micro-level; Earthsim is a wildly ambitious and visually glorious construction. Just as a child’s first encounter with an atlas re-shapes their thinking of the world forever so to does Earthsim promise to fold the conceptual paradigm of how we see our planet.

But there’s something else at play here, a distinct embodiment of new visual languages.

A simulation such as Earthsim may be many things to many perspectives but at its core Earthsim is Cinema. Without the cinematic, without the art of the moving image, Earthsim is a series of maps and images. Though presented digitally and electronically the language constructs by which we view maps and images are fundamentally different to those communicative tenets by which we experience (rather than view) the moving image.

What is driving this cinematic language - distinct and new from traditional cinema’s Mise en scene frame and Montage sequence of frames - is the same language element that is at the heart of so many  contemporary cinematic forms, the virtual camera.

The shared element of Gaming, Motion Graphics, 3D animation and Compositing is the Virtual Camera – the non-physical vanishing point in space that is the node of resolution from which a viewer experiences the cinematic scene. In live action the mechanical camera apparatus provides this vanishing point for the viewer. But by its physical nature invariably possessed profoundly physical constraints and a tangible awareness of its spatial occupation. The camera couldn’t go through walls, couldn’t move in infinite directions.

But the virtual camera is non-physical and its spatial occupation infinite. It is the vanishing point of the cinematic space – the point at which perspective converges. All genres of Gaming have utilized the virtual camera in various forms – from Wonderboy-like Side-Scrollers, to the Doom derived First person Shooter, to the God-View cameras of Total War and The Sims. So to do all forms of Motion Graphics find their common aesthetic platform in the virtual camera via a layered compositional space of multiple and blended perspectives coexisting in a hybrid environment. So to 3D animation and the 3D virtual environment where composition is cartesian; an array of X, Y and Z space with the experience of watching a deliberate composition of the viewer into the architecture; their ‘eyes’ composed into the space.

The virtual camera is the maypole around which a maelstrom of media hybridity dances and its impact on cinematic language is both subtle and profound. The 20th century was imbued with a language of the cut; the construction of meaning by the sequence of seeing. To construct a ’story’ (in the most broad use of the term) we jumped in progressive succession from image-island to image-island forming cinematic land-bridges as we went to make sense of the journey. But in the 21st century we no longer bother with the staccato of the CUT, rather we invoke the infinite positioning of the virtual camera to fly our perspective in infinite and continual progressions along a continuum rather than an archipelago.

We no longer CUT-TO we MOVE-TO.

Hence we come back to Earthsim (and indeed Google Earth to some extent) which is much more than a Digital-Globe or Hybrid-Documentary Atlas. Earthsim employs, as its key mechanism of experience; the experiential paradigm of its engagement,  the Virtual Camera. And in so doing becomes a work of pure contemporary cinema employing not the language of the word or the text or the image but of the cinematic.

If the sole desired outcome of Google Earth was to present an on-line global map system then the act of double clicking a point on the globe would JUMP-CUT you to that position. If the sole aim of Earthsim was to provide an interface to view documentary information about the Earth then selecting a topic or environment would be the electronic version of turning a ‘page’, a jump to the selected viewing. But neither Earthsim or Google Earth function this way; rather they both employ a continuum of perspective whereby both tools Fly the viewer to the destination with the visual, and indeed visceral, journey between the point of selection and the point of arrival is the experience.

Marshall McLuhan strikes again as once more we are reminded that the “Medium is the Message” with the Virtual Camera quickly becoming the consistent cinematic occupant by which to understand the aesthetics of these new mediums.

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VANISHING POINT: SPATIAL COMPOSITION & THE VIRTUAL CAMERA -
Seminar presentation at the University of NSW school of media theatre and film looking the construction and perception of the virtual camera in gaming and cinema and its impact on cinematic spatiality. Presented here as a two-part Podcast.
Part1
Part2

I was asked 3 times this week what I do…? Obviously this was in reference to what i do for a living, and each time the answer was intolerably difficult to iterate. It would appear that I am a definitive child of the digital age; Jack of all trades and increasingly failing to see the separations between them.

There is a traditional notion of Professionals vs Non Professionals (Doctors and Accountants as opposed to Plumbers and Carpenters) which was based on the idea that professionals made a living by what they KNEW and non-professionals made a living from what they could DO. But this is a useless definition in the 21st century and perhaps never had any real relevance. Likewise the idea that a Professional needed qualifications where a Non-Professional did not, is simply not the case as the idea of trained and attained qualifications appear across virtually all forms of work careers.

More useful perhaps is the notion that a professional is defined as having skills based on theoretical knowledge. The idea being here that carpentry, plumbing, building are highly skilled but aren’t necessarily based on theoretical or conceptual ideas – Medicine, Science and Law as prime examples of work that does. And yet there are too many holes in this framework to make it useful with plenty of careers regarded as ‘professions’, such as Real Estate Agents that have a long stretch to make a case that there’s an underlying theoretical knowledge at play.

Professional and Amateur (often labeled Consumer) are terms bandied about with painful regularity in the creative industries. One can barely find a creative software tool that doesn’t bare the moniker of ‘Pro’ in its name – evidently this is marketing department efforts to convince consumers that they’ll be thought of as “professionals” if they use that particular brand. Subsequently then with the distinct implication that to Not use that software means you’re Not a professional.

The terms Professional and Consumer in the creative industries are shrouded in mystique of culture and social structure, pecking order and ego but when boiled down to simple definition it may be said that, if nothing else, a Creative Professional makes a living in creative industry where as an amateur/consumer does it on the side; as hobby, passion and endeavor. This is a distinction that functions certainly for areas such as sport.

So by that notion it becomes interesting to ask myself, Am I Professional? And if so, more significantly, a professional what…? If I take just the work-roles I have been engaged in over the past 3 months I am indelibly a professional Filmmaker, Producer, Editor, Teacher, Journalist, Consultant, Academic and Website developer. These are the roles I have engaged of late to make a living. Is this enough to make me a ‘Professional’…? Or does the fact that no one of these roles as a singular pursuit was enough to make a living: I needed them all the sum of the parts don’t make the whole; 8 professional bits don’t make 1 full Professional.

The long standing perception has been therefore that one only become a professional with specialization - the focus on a singular pursuit: professional Editor, Director or Screenwriter? This has long been the cultural perception, if not the actual definition, of professional.

But in the digital age the attachment of ‘Professional’ to the idea of ‘Specialization’ is rendered arguably useless and without worth. The domain of the singular art professional, the specialist, is beset on all sides by a fundamentally different production culture; a culture that is, by proxy, re-defining the term professional itself.

When the distinction between production and post-production is extremely hazy, where the distinction between live-action and animation hard to discern, the separation between ‘passive’ and ‘interactive’ media largely irrelevant; then its inevitable that the roles we play in producing media in this hybridized and hazy environment become similarly blurred. In doing so they loose their traditional connections with Professional as Specialist and with the idea that the Professional is someone who makes a living with a specific set of knowledge-skills related to a particular task.

Add to this the opening up of the technology itself to holistic processes – a unified and shared creative sandpit where distinctions between media forms, acquisitions types and output platforms for creative projects are fused and parallel rather than segmented and hierarchical – and we have a very different filtration of the idea of the Professional.  (see a previous post about the new paradigm of Photoshop)

In the creative industries what is left is distilled remnants of previous definitions, stripped of their detritus. The Professional as someone employing skills based on conceptual and theoretical knowledge; The Professional as one who makes a living from those skills and knowledge; and The Professional as one who utilities their skills and knowledge in a professional manner with Professionalism… The last of these is just too hard to define (and yet so highly valued). The second is purely pragmatic defining.

But to my mind its the first that stands as the only really tangible distinction of the Professional – a monkey can be taught to use a camera, a child instructed how to cut sequences in an NLE. But only a professional can perform these tasks and use these skills with a larger conceptual understanding and a theoretical positioning focused on making meaning, building context and communicating ideas.

Until we embrace the Professional as the embodiment of the Conceptual – until we fuse Skills and Practice with Theoretical critical thinking we will, as members of the creative industry, fail to be and act professionally….

There are undoubtedly a significant number of technology driven elements that have in just the past decade fundamentally altered or shifted the established notions of what cinematic media is. And whilst Interactivity, Gaming, Virtual Cameras and On line distribution all fit this bill there are others that, though more subtle, have a none the less profound impact on visual language.

One of these is the conjoined arts of Motion Graphics and Compositing. Simply put these represent the shift from cinematic media assembly and language as a sequential progression to a layered simultaneous composition. Adding a vertical dimension to the otherwise horizontal montage.

And yet it perusing the knowledge base of writing about Motion Graphics and Compositing (a base that on a rigorous academic level is somewhat under populated) there seems a disparate and problematic  discourse of perspective on what Motion Graphics and Compositing are and what they represent.

Take for example Steve Wright’s perspective of definition for Compositing from his book ‘Digital compositing for film and video’…

“The ultimate artistic objective of the digital composite is to take images from a variety of different sources and combine them in such a way that they appear to have been shot at the same time under the same lighting conditions and with the same camera”
[page1]

Whilst this objective of perceptual ‘believability’ and ‘reality’ might be a valid objective for many compositing projects, to suggest that it is the ultimate aim of Compositing as an artistic process is simply too limiting and narrow; lacking in foresight and unable to account for the broad palette of possibilities both for now and for wht is to come.

More specifically this narrow attachment to realistic believability brings Compositing down to a much restrained and limited notion of perspective drawn from traditional cinematic thinking - multiple visions of a singular perspective rather than what is possible through compositing - singular vision with multiple perspectives.

The book ‘Motion by design’ by David Robbins, Spencer Drate, Judith Salavetz puts this into a succinct context:

“We now have the ability with sequence to show an entire context and the simultaneity of a particular event.”
[page7]

Its this notion of vertical editing and Eisenstein montage principles exerted in concurrent space rather than a sequential one that begins to point toward a new cinematic language capable of simultaneously deliver greater communicative efficiency along with visual complexity.

The father of contemporary motion graphics, Saul Bass, has made these connections in the example of the movie title sequence:

“a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already ave an emotional resonance with it.” [Interview in Film Quarterly Autumn 1996]

Lev Manovich has discussed much of this visual cinematic evolution in the context of the emergence of software-only compositing motion graphics systems such as After Effects. What he has termed the cinematicVelvet Revolution: in that its a revolution that has taken place quietly and without overt commentary and observation.

The thrust of this idea is focused on where cinematic media is heading in the context of of where it has come from. Where once cinematic media was rooted in the ‘Photographic’ as visual norm Manovich comments that:

“the ‘pure’ moving image media became an exception and hybrid media became the norm…. While the particular aesthetic solutions vary from one piece to the next and from one designer to another, they all share the same logic: the appearance of multiple media simultaneously in the same frame. Whether these media are openly juxtaposed or almost seamlessly blended together is less important than the fact of this co-presence itself.”

This points toward my assertion of cinematic space and aesthetics determined as much by production process as by composition technique. That the software environment is a space of production and due to its uniform non hierarchy of media creates a new composition space of coexistence that defies extant notions of composition, foreground/background and visual language of spatial arrangement. Simply put, the tools of production no longer make hierarchical or segmented media distinctions and therefor it is only natural that our visual language made from those tools moves to the same aesthetic.

Its often said, usually by those wishing to bypass the puerile “my software’s better than your software” arguments, that production software (NLE, DAW, Compositor etc) are simply tools, glorified hammers. But with the above perspectives and observations there is something inherently problematic about perceiving of production software as simple hammers. A builder changing their choice of hammer does not change the look, feel and aesthetic of the House they are building. It make it easier or faster but the structure neither changes nor is influenced by the tool.

The same cannot be said of digital software tools where the aesthetics of what is made by the tool is fundamentally altered by the tool itself.

Cinematography and visual language changed forever with the advent of the fluid head tripod and even further with the invention of the steadi-cam. The tool changed the aesthetic and the viewer’s expectations. Likewise in a world of After Effects and NLE’s that add compositing and multiple layers to the editors toolkit, what is made by those tools is fundamentally different to what was made prior to those tools.

Cinematic production is traditionally a linear progressive process - From script, to storyboard, to shoot, to edit to sound mix to delivery.

Subsequently, more often than not, we teach cinematic production following the same linear progression. At both secondary and tertiary levels we tend to examine in learning each element of production process in much the same order as a traditional production would function; script first, then camera, then post-production editing and sound. But is this really the best or most effective way to teach filmmaking?

The fundamental cornerstone of all engaged and effective learning is context. Communicating and teaching a concept in the abstract, disconnected from other ideas or process, is far more difficult than when the new concept is tangibly connected to other already understood ideas. Simile, metaphor and example are at the heart of good teach by their ability to construct context around a new idea.

It is here that we might see the underlying problem with teaching filmmaking process following in the same order as it is traditionally made; a distinct lack of context.

A screenplay is not a work if literature - its arguably not a writing discipline at all - rather it is a blueprint for production. A screenplay doesn’t exist to be read and everything about its form, structure and tenets is designed specifically for facilitating production and visual interpretation. And so by its very nature you cannot effectively write a screenplay or even engage with the screenwriting process without an understanding of the process of shooting and making a movie. The screenplay, as a concept, is fundamentally out of context without that experience.

The shooting of a movie, the acquisition of the principle photography, is at the heart of what traditional filmmaking is - the staging of performance and the composition of shots. But on its own cinematography is just the acquisition of images. A movie doesn’t become a movie until those images arranged, edited and sequenced. Without an experience and understanding of editing - what that process requires of the images it arranges - shooting is distinctly out of context. The process of shooting can only be comprehended fully in the knowledge of what is needed of, and what will be done to, the shots themselves.

The understanding of each part of the cinematic production process can only be contextualized by an understanding of the production components and processes that follow. Without that contextual knowledge processes such as script writing are rendered dislocated and abstracted.

In this light there is a strong argument to suggest that for a contextually underpinned learning of cinematic production concepts to take place, the components themselves should be learned in reverse order.

Starting students on a learning continuum about filmmaking that is grounded, empowering and contextualized should begin with editing and post production. Not only does this allow for the cinematic experience to be informed from an holistic and integrated perspective - one starts from the ‘whole’, the end phase where all components come together - but also builds the learning process on a self motivated model. A student thrown in at the editing phase will quickly and invariably realize the crucial importance of good cinematography and in particular coverage; thus they will become self directed towards and engagement with the camera from a contextualized position. As a student immerses themselves in the art of the camera and the acquisition of images they will quickly and invariably realize the need for a considered and articulate script. Here students will arrive finally at at the screenplay from a position of motivated need and contextual understanding where they understand holistically the broad functions the screenplay serves.

Just because cinema tends to work a prescribed linear segmented process flowing in one direction does not mean that you have to learn filmmaking in that same pre-ordained order.