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Mark Jenkin shows the process of his filmmaking

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Mark Jenkin shows the process of his filmmaking

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Bait film-maker Mark Jenkin: Why I ditched digital

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Man with a Movie Camera (2014 Restoration trailer) In UK cinemas 31 July 2015 | BFI Release | BFI

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Some of the greatest Star Wars stories are those from behind the scenes. In Saga Chronicles, Lucasfilm's Lucas Seastrom tells those tales.

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was the first major blockbuster movie shot entirely in a digital format. Over five years in active development, Lucasfilm partnered with Sony and Panavision to create a prototype digital cinema camera that bypassed the use of traditional celluloid film. For Lucasfilm, it was the continuation of a decades-long series of innovations to improve the craft of filmmaking and allow storytellers like George Lucas to realize their full vision onscreen.

Now 20 years after the release of Attack of the Clones, productions across the film and television industries use digital cameras of all kinds as others continue to use celluloid film. Mike Blanchard is Lucasfilm's vice president of post-production and worked as post-supervisor and technical supervisor on all three of the Star Wars prequel films. Intimately involved in the development of Clones' digital camera system and related workflow, he reflects on the momentous experience and discusses how Episode II helped change filmmaking.
Note: This interview originally appeared in the Star Wars Celebration 2022 Commemorative Guide.
Mike Blanchard: I got to Lucasfilm in 1995, and I was hired to work on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. It was after the show's ABC broadcast run, and we were joining the episodes together into feature-length versions to be released on video. We were shooting new material to bridge the episodes and we also changed the openings to be more theatrical. I had gone to film school and I'd wanted to work at Lucasfilm for years.

StarWars.com: So you came onto the team that worked very closely with George Lucas on his film and television projects.

Mike Blanchard: George created a small company called JAK Films that was separate from the rest of the company. We were all in the Main House at Skywalker Ranch, and the center of activity was the editorial area downstairs.

Since we were a small group, that meant when things were really busy we weren't just going to bring in a lot of people. We had to figure things out, and that was great because it meant you had to have a general knowledge of everything. We were always learning new things. It was great because you never knew what you might be doing when you came into the office each day. I was constantly researching newer technologies that were coming out, because you never knew when something might be applicable to what we were doing. Or, more accurately, since George has a keen ability to identify ways of working that are antiquated or hindering to his creative process, you have to be ready.
StarWars.com: Did you have any prior experience working with video or digital formats of any kind?
Mike Blanchard: I had to work my way through college with multiple jobs, and those tended to be in the audio/visual field. Making corporate videos, doing multi-camera set-ups in courtrooms, audio engineering for bands, those types of things. When I was in film school, for students like me who didn't have a lot of resources, the idea that we were going to pay for film stock and processing to shoot on 16mm film was kind of a non-starter.

I had embraced video both as a student and in these jobs that I was doing, and I knew it much better than I did film processes. The more I worked with film, the more frustrated I'd get. I remember arguing with my professors because they hated video, but I thought I should be allowed to do projects with it. Clearly the quality had a long way to go, but for learning the craft of storytelling, it had a lot of advantages. That was ten years before I came to Lucasfilm. I understood that video was something very practical and more accessible, but I certainly didn't think that you could shoot a major motion picture with it. The image quality just wasn't good enough.
StarWars.com: Lucasfilm had been involved in the integration of computer technology and filmmaking tools since way back on the production of Star Wars: A New Hope. This involved everything from visual effects to picture and sound editing tools. By the time George Lucas was preparing to make the Star Wars prequel trilogy, he desired to make the films with a completely digital, computer-based workflow. Were these preparations already taking place when you first arrived? StarWars.com: It's important to understand that Lucasfilm had been helping develop these tools and technologies since before principal photography started on The Phantom Menace, let alone Attack of the Clones. You would make visits to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention and other shows to meet with potential technology partners. What was your view of the industry landscape at that time?
Mike Blanchard: Relatively soon after I arrived in 1995, one of the first things we were doing was digital beta-cam tests. We shot them at Skywalker Ranch, and we tried out different lenses that used adaptors that would allow us to use more cinema-quality glass. There was a lot of stuff going on as we were ramping up to do the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition and The Phantom Menace. It was exploratory. We were trying to discover the potential benefits and the roadblocks. At the time, there was not a clear pathway to shooting an entire movie with digital cameras.

Mike Blanchard: We were all very busy and had several projects going on and we didn't want to waste George or [producer] Rick McCallum's time. We needed to find people to help us, and we didn't have the time to get bogged down in the usual back and forth between legal departments before we could even determine if it would be fruitful to work together. I would go to NAB and have these meetings with vendors and manufacturers, it was very informal. I was like an advance scout trying to gauge if what we needed done would be mutually beneficial enough for them to remain committed. Companies want to work with Lucasfilm given our reputation and the vast reach of Star Wars but we needed to find partners that would embrace the rebel spirit of this.
StarWars.com: And, of course, it's also important to keep in mind that initially the plan was to shoot digitally for The Phantom Menace, but that was deemed too difficult to manage in time. There were some digital shots captured during pick-ups of that film, but it shows that this was continuing to evolve in parallel with the creation of the prequel films.
It became pretty clear early on that the only viable choice for the camera manufacturer was Sony. They had an end-to-end broadcast business with their cameras, monitors, and ancillary equipment, and we felt there were enough components that we could adapt to make it work for us. Sony offered the shortest path to reach our goal, and they recognized that it could turn into a new business for them.

StarWars.com: As this experimentation continued ahead of Attack of the Clones, one important colleague who joined the team was engineer Fred Meyers.
Mike Blanchard: Yes. That was really important because building lenses is a long, complicated process, and there are only a few companies that could do it well. I looked at the camera reports from the original Star Wars trilogy to see what prime lenses were used, but there was no way they could make all of those lenses in time, so instead they just made two zoom lenses to cover that entire focal range.

Mike Blanchard: Ultimately, what happened was we shot some scenes digitally for Episode I, but that system was vastly different than what we used for Episode II. Episode I was a reel-to-reel 30 frames-per-second system. Just thinking about it makes me laugh! For George it was a way to signal to the industry how serious he was about it. Our next line in the sand was that we'd be shooting all of Episode II digitally in June of 2000, which meant ideally we had to have the new camera package ready to go a few months before that. From there it was about determining what was possible within that timeline.

The Episode I pick-ups were shot in August of 1998. So we had about a year and a half to get the new camera and all the ancillary equipment and workflows in place. Even with all of the research and development that we had been doing, we weren't close to being ready ahead of Episode II. We were pushing the envelope with beta equipment, and I mean that in the software sense of using systems that aren't fully baked or tested. The four main cameras we used in Australia for principal photography had the serial numbers 00001-00004. That's how close it was. No wonder we were stressed! We essentially had less than a year from the release of Episode I to the start of shooting on Episode II.
StarWars.com: Earlier you touched on the fact that Sony cameras used for Attack of the Clones were "beta" versions with a lot of testing and development still required. These cameras arrived quite late in the process, roughly a week before the start of shooting. What do you recall about that final week and the last-minute tests that were happening?
Mike Blanchard: Fred joined us pretty early in the process. He was working at Industrial Light & Magic [ILM]. He was the perfect person to shepherd the engineering aspects of this because in addition to him being the chief engineer at ILM, he had a vast knowledge of camera imaging and optics. He knew all the potential pinch points that would be created given ILM's current workflow and how it would need to change to make it work in an end-to-end digital pipeline. This was important because it allowed us to work through both the camera challenges and all the back-end post-production and distribution challenges in parallel. Without Fred, there is no way all of the engineering issues could have been sorted out in time to be able to shoot Episode II digitally.

StarWars.com: Thank you for speaking to the adversity that you and the crew faced. It's inspiring that these stories demonstrate everyone's persistence and unwillingness to give up. Rick McCallum has said that there were no film cameras in reserve just in case something didn't work. It was all or nothing. In a case like this, it's almost like the darkest moment right before dawn. Could I also ask about the first day of the shoot? This involved a scene with Ian McDiarmid as Chancellor Palpatine in the Senate Chamber. It was later cut from the film. Do you have a memory of that day? StarWars.com: It's fascinating to hear about this because in a way it feels similar to the stories of Thomas Edison's early motion-picture studio over 100 years ago where everything was experimental and brand new. Attack of the Clones was like this experience of learning how to make movies all over again.

Mike Blanchard: Theatrical 35mm film is shot and projected at 24-frames-per-second. Video is different in that it blends two image fields at about 30-frames-per-second, like the camera we used for pick-ups on Episode I. That can create issues with motion and image resolution when compared to theatrical film. We were trying to get a one-to-one relationship for everything, so the target was 24-frames-per-second, which had been the standard since the early days of sound cinema. This was particularly important because the imaging sensors available for digital cameras were less than the resolution of 35mm negative film, so we had to get the most out of every pixel.

Mike Blanchard: That was a very important part of the process for us. We output each reel from the digital files to one continuous piece of negative, which bypassed the traditional photochemical processes that involved multiple passes in order to make the prints for the theaters.

The traditional method begins with the original camera negative, and from that you print what are called an interpositive and then an internegative, and you make the final release prints from the internegative. But the image quality degrades with each pass. It's an analog, photochemical process and frankly I can't believe the industry did that for as long as they did.
StarWars.com: If I could touch on a lighter point, I was hoping to ask about your cameo in the film? You appear in the Jedi Temple wearing the usual robes and sporting a pair of antennae.

So beginning with the digital version of the movie, we ended up making all of our film prints off of "original negative" as opposed to a third generation duplicate negative. It made a big difference in how our prints looked and made quality control easier. The challenging part was the daunting schedule because we had to finish the visual effects in each reel much earlier than we normally would. The numbers were pretty crazy. It took about 45 hours to film out the negative of each reel in the movie, and we made seven negatives of each reel so for over two months we had three film recorders running night and day. Every morning I'd get a report of how many frames were done overnight. It was yet another part of the crazy journey to get the movie to the theaters in time. I won't even mention the brown-outs we had in California and how disruptive those power outages were!
StarWars.com: Before we close, could I ask you to reflect a little on the significance of what was accomplished with the production of Attack of the Clones? What did this mean for the craft of filmmaking?
Mike Blanchard: It was good for everyone involved on the set. It's very helpful for the makeup artist to notice things that they could go in and fix right then and there. The set painters had to do more touch-ups because the level of detail was unforgiving. That was part of the philosophical debate that had been going on regarding shooting digitally. Some people in the industry preferred the ethereal quality in film that hid a lot of detail. Digital was new and clean, and some people were afraid, but for us it was another point of value to add to the list. If it could help the crew see what was going on, it democratized the process and enhanced everyone's ability to contribute.

Mike Blanchard: That actually brings up a terrible memory. It was very late in the build-up to the first day of shooting. We'd received a film-out test back from the lab, and it was awful. It didn't look right. We managed to sort it out, but it caused a lot of stress. That was definitely a low point because it was so late and we'd done so much work. Fred and I were frantically trying to sort it out. You just don't want to have anything like that at the 11 th hour to shake the confidence of the team. There was so much at stake and many people in the business were actively rooting against us.

Somewhere along the way, something went wrong with this test, but we'd seen enough to know the system was okay. But it was hard not to wonder what we might have missed. There's a lot of excitement and anxiety right before production starts. This was just another hiccup that you forget about after the fact, but in the moment, it's dozens of phone calls back and forth and lots of waiting for the lab to re-process everything again.

Mike Blanchard: Yes, I do. I was standing behind Fred in his engineering area and looking over the top of the monitors and seeing the camera up on the crane. My eyes kept bouncing back and forth between the monitors and the live scene in front of me. To my left, George was directing from his monitors.

I thought to myself, "Oh my god, we're doing this!" Everything went great that day. Fred did a phenomenal job working with the camera assistants to help them transition to the new camera. To wrap just that first day was a huge sigh of relief. You can test things over and over but it's never the same as actually doing it. At wrap, I said to Fred what a relief it was to finish the first day. He just smiled at me and said, "Only 70 more days to go."

Mike Blanchard: Actually, from a director's standpoint, we consciously tried to make the creative process the same. All the back-end engineering and workflow didn't need to be part of it in order to tell a good story. George felt the large monitors on the set were a benefit, and we should use them. Some directors still don't like them on their sets. Regardless of what technology is used to tell a story, the process remains largely the same. George used to say that all these innovations are just another tool for telling a story, just like a painter choosing whether to work with oil or watercolor paint.

Mike Blanchard: Like all change, it can be difficult for some people to get on board and really embrace doing things in a new way. We were moving ahead regardless and didn't have the time to constantly debate the film vs. digital discussion over and over. It was pretty much either you're going to help or just get out of the way. That was another benefit of George owning the company, we knew what he wanted us to do, we just had to go out and try to make it happen.

Mike Blanchard: Yes. I worked with Fred and our editorial team. We were recording safety copies of the footage in real time, which gave us a copy of the original footage that you can never get when you shoot on film. We had to make standard definition tapes of the camera masters for the editors to cut with, and that conversion could lead to sound synchronization issues, so everything had to be checked and re-checked to make sure the tapes were in sync with the master tapes. One huge benefit to shooting digitally was that the editors had the morning's footage later the same day. On a film-based show, it can take multiple days. So if the editor thought we might want to pick up another shot just in case we'd want it later, we could do that while that scene was still being shot as opposed to going back to it later. It helped create an immediate feedback loop for George, which was very helpful. We also had an editorial team back at Skywalker Ranch, so I was making sure they were in sync with everything going on in Australia.

We had to carefully train everyone in editorial to follow all of these new steps very carefully. They had to know the problems to look out for. It didn't matter how long you'd worked in the business, everyone had to be trained in a specific way. All sorts of things needed to be checked throughout the process. The crew was great and they got into it, it was just a matter of explaining why things needed to be done a different way.

Mike Blanchard: I didn't go with the crew on location, but I remember Fred emailing me about how hot it was. We had been concerned that it would be so hot in Tunisia that the cameras and computers would just fail. But miraculously, they didn't. That was actually part of why we ended up with Sony for the cameras. Earlier on, before The Phantom Menace was released, we'd started using Sony digi-beta cameras for behind-the-scenes coverage. They were using those cameras in Tunisia for the Episode I shoot, and many news organizations were using them in very harsh environments. It was literally battle-tested. That gave us confidence that these newer cameras would hold up in the field.

Mike Blanchard: Absolutely! That was during post-production when ILM was busy working on all the visual effects shots. Quite often we'd use ILM employees as background extras. I was talking with [visual effects supervisor] John Knoll at one point, and jokingly said, "Hey, when do I get to be in a shot?" Sometime later, I was asked to come down and play a Jedi.

Many weeks after we'd shot that scene, we were reviewing the completed shot in dailies with George. He'd use his laser pointer to note things that needed changing, and just when I thought he was done commenting on it and I'd escaped any commentary, he started circling my head with the laser pointer and said, "Who's this guy?" He joked, "There are no bald Jedi! Put some antennae on him!" I was thinking, "What about Mace Windu?!" I was laughing along with everyone else, and he didn't cut me out of the film! I've been meaning to ask Dave Filoni to create a backstory for me.

I'd honestly forgotten about this over the years, but later when I had kids, and they started getting old enough to watch the films, I pointed myself out. The wide-eyed look on their faces as they tried to figure out how their dad was a Jedi in a Star Wars film was priceless.

Mike Blanchard: There's no question that it hastened the adoption of shooting digitally across the industry, but there's really no way to quantify how much longer it would have taken without George pushing the envelope. The risk he was taking cannot be overstated. Over time, it's easy to forget all the negative chatter and resistance we were getting across the industry. George wasn't just trying to shoot digitally, it was also about digital projection and getting the films to look as he intended in every theater anywhere in the world. When you disrupt a multi-billion dollar business you are going to take a lot of heat from all directions.

Currently all these technologies are so ubiquitous that it's easy to think this was just a natural progression of technology but it really wasn't. Star Wars is immensely popular and people care about the tools used to make these films. It's a pulpit that no other film could have had. I guarantee you no studio head would have given the green light to making a 100 million dollar film with a new camera system. That's why it's so great to look back on the journey now. There isn't anyone other than George with the vision and resources to have done it. I had a front row seat and I'll be forever grateful.

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Saga Chronicles: Lucasfilm's Mike Blanchard on the Digital Innovation Behind Star Wars: Attack of the Clones

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Some of the greatest Star Wars stories are those from behind the scenes. In Saga Chronicles, Lucasfilm's Lucas Seastrom tells those tales . Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was the first major blockbuster movie shot entirely in a digital format.

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Tarkovsky Interview: a poet in the cinema (1984)

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Tarkovsky Interview: a poet in the cinema (1984)

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Mark Jenkin on his process of filmmaking.

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Mark Jenkin on his process of filmmaking.

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Mark Jenkin on Bait, 16mm, and Experimental Editing | NDNF19

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New trailer for Bait - In cinemas 30 August | BFI

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Mark Jenkin & Crew Win Outstanding British Debut for Bait | EE BAFTA Film Awards 2020

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Quentin Tarantino comments on Digital vs Film

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BY LEV MANOVICH

Thus far, most discussions of cinema in the digital age have focused on the possibilities of interactive narrative. It is not hard to understand why: since the majority of viewers and critics equate cinema with storytelling, digital media is understood as something that will let cinema tell its stories in a new way. Yet as exciting as the ideas of a viewer participating in a story, choosing different paths through the narrative space, and interacting with characters may be, they only address one aspect of cinema which is neither unique nor, as many will argue, essential to it: narrative.

The challenge which digital media poses to cinema extends far beyond the issue of narrative. Digital media redefines the very identity of cinema. In a symposium that took place in Hollywood in the spring of 1996, one of the participants provocatively referred to movies as "flatties" and to human actors as "organics" and "soft fuzzies."[2] As these terms accurately suggest, what used to be cinema's defining characteristics have become just the default options, with many others available. When one can "enter" a virtual three-dimensional space, viewing flat images projected on the screen is hardly the only option. When, given enough time and money, almost everything can be simulated in a computer, filming physical reality is just one possibility.

This "crisis" of cinema's identity also affects the terms and the categories used to theorize cinema's past. French film theorist Christian Metz wrote in the 1970s that "Most films shot today, good or bad, original or not, 'commercial' or not, have as a common characteristic that they tell a story; in this measure they all belong to one and the same genre, which is, rather, a sort of 'super-genre' [' sur-genre']" (402). In identifying fictional films as a "super-genre" of 20th-century cinema, Metz did not bother to mention another characteristic of this genre because at that time it was too obvious: fictional films are live-action films, i.e. they largely consist of unmodified photographic recordings of real events which took place in real physical space. Today, in the age of computer simulation and digital compositing, invoking this characteristic becomes crucial in defining the specificity of 20th-century cinema. From the perspective of a future historian of visual culture, the differences between classical Hollywood films, European art films, and avant-garde films (apart from abstract ones) may appear less significant than this common feature: that they relied on lens-based recordings of reality. This essay is concerned with the effect of the so-called digital revolution on cinema as defined by its "super-genre" of fictional live-action film.[3]

During cinema's history, a whole repertoire of techniques (lighting, art direction, the use of different film stocks and lenses, etc.) was developed to modify the basic record obtained by a film apparatus. And yet behind even the most stylized cinematic images we can discern the bluntness, the sterility, the banality of early 19th-century photographs. No matter how complex its stylistic innovations, the cinema has found its base in these deposits of reality, these samples obtained by a methodical and prosaic process. Cinema emerged out of the same impulse that engendered naturalism, court stenography, and wax museums. Cinema is the art of the index; it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint.

Even for Andrei Tarkovsky, film-painter par excellence, cinema's identity lay in its ability to record reality. Once, during a public discussion in Moscow in the 1970s, he was asked the question as to whether he was interested in making abstract films. He replied that there can be no such thing. Cinema's most basic gesture is to open the shutter and to start the film rolling, recording whatever happens to be in front of the lens. For Tarkovsky, an abstract cinema is thus impossible.

But what happens to cinema's indexical identity if it is now possible to generate photorealistic scenes entirely in a computer using 3-D computer animation; to modify individual frames or whole scenes with the help a digital paint program; to cut, bend, stretch and stitch digitized film images into something which has perfect photographic credibility, although it was never actually filmed?

This essay will address the meaning of these changes in the filmmaking process from the point of view of the larger cultural history of the moving image. Seen in this context, the manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to 19th-century pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated. At the turn of the 20th century, cinema was to delegate these manual techniques to animation and define itself as a recording medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are again becoming commonplace in the filmmaking process. Consequently, cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting.

This argument will be developed-in three stages. I will first follow a historical trajectory from 19th-century techniques for creating moving images to 20th-century cinema and animation. Next I will arrive at a definition of digital cinema by abstracting the common features and interface metaphors of a variety of computer software and hardware that are currently replacing traditional film technology. Seen together, these features and metaphors suggest a distinct logic of a digital moving image. This logic subordinates the photographic and the cinematic to the painterly and the graphic, destroying cinema's identity as a media art. Finally, I will examine different production contexts that already use digital moving images-Hollywood films, music videos, CD-ROM games and artworks-in order to see if and how this logic has begun to manifest itself.
A Brief Archaeology of Moving Pictures
As signified by its original names (kinetoscope, cinematograph, moving pictures), cinema was understood, from its birth, as the art of motion, the art that finally succeeded in creating a convincing illusion of dynamic reality. If we approach cinema in this way (rather than the art of audio-visual narrative, or the art of a projected image, or the art of collective spectatorship, etc.), we can see it superseding previous techniques for creating and displaying moving images.

These earlier techniques shared a number of common characteristics. First, they all relied on hand-painted or hand-drawn images. The magic lantern slides were painted at least until the 1850s; so were the images used in the Phenakistiscope, the Thaumatrope, the Zoetrope, the Praxinoscope, the Choreutoscope and numerous other 19th-century pre-cinematic devices. Even Muybridge's celebrated Zoopraxiscope lectures of the 1880s featured not actual photographs but colored drawings painted after the photographs (Musser 49-50).

Not only were the images created manually, they were also manually animated. In Robertson's Phantasmagoria, which premiered in 1799, magic lantern operators moved behind the screen in order to make projected images appear to advance and withdraw (Musser 25). More often, an exhibitor used only his hands, rather than his whole body, to put the images into motion. One animation technique involved using mechanical slides consisting of a number of layers. An exhibitor would slide the layers to animate the image (Ceram 44-45). Another technique was to slowly move a long slide containing separate images in front of a magic lantern lens. 19th-century optical toys enjoyed in private homes also required manual action to create movement-twirling the strings of the Thaumatrope, rotating the Zoetrope's cylinder, turning the Viviscope's handle.

It was not until the last decade of the 19th century that the automatic generation of images and their automatic projection were finally combined. A mechanical eye was coupled with a mechanical heart; photography met the motor. As a result, cinema-a very particular regime of the visible-was born. Irregularity, non-uniformity, the accident and other traces of the human body, which previously inevitably accompanied moving image exhibitions, were replaced by the uniformity of machine vision.[4] A machine that, like a conveyer belt, was now spitting out images, all sharing the same appearance, all the same size, all moving at the same speed, like a line of marching soldiers.

Cinema also eliminated the discrete character of both space and movement in moving images. Before cinema, the moving element was visually separated from the static background as with a mechanical slide show or Reynaud's Praxinoscope Theater (1892) (Robinson 12). The movement itself was limited in range and affected only a clearly defined figure rather than the whole image. Thus, typical actions would include a bouncing ball, a raised hand or eyes, a butterfly moving back and forth over the heads of fascinated children-simple vectors charted across still fields.

Cinema's most immediate predecessors share something else. As the 19th-century obsession with movement intensified, devices that could animate more than just a few images became increasingly popular. All of them-the Zoetrope, the Phonoscope, the Tachyscope, the Kinetoscope-were based on loops, sequences of images featuring complete actions which can be played repeatedly. The Thaumatrope (1825), in which a disk with two different images painted on each face was rapidly rotated by twirling a string attached to it, was in its essence a loop in its most minimal form: two elements replacing one another in succession. In the Zoetrope (1867) and its numerous variations, approximately a dozen images were arranged around the perimeter of a circle.[5] The Mutoscope, popular in America throughout the 1890s, increased the duration of the loop by placing a larger number of images radially on an axle (Ceram 140). Even Edison's Kinetoscope (1892-1896), the first modern cinematic machine to employ film, continued to arrange images in a loop (Musser 78). 50 feet of film translated to an approximately 20-second long presentation-a genre whose potential development was cut short when cinema adopted a much longer narrative form.
From Animation to Cinema
Once the cinema was stabilized as a technology, it cut all references to its origins in artifice. Everything which characterized moving pictures before the 20th century-the manual construction of images, loop actions, the discrete nature of space and movement-was delegated to cinema's bastard relative, its supplement, its shadow-animation. 20th-century animation became a depository for 19th-century moving-image techniques left behind by cinema.

The opposition between the styles of animation and cinema defined the culture of the moving image in the 20th century. Animation foregrounds its artificial character, openly admitting that its images are mere representations. Its visual language is more aligned to the graphic than to the photographic. It is discrete and self-consciously discontinuous: crudely rendered characters moving against a stationary and detailed background; sparsely and irregularly sampled motion (in contrast to the uniform sampling of motion by a film camera-recall Jean-Luc Godard's definition of cinema as "truth 24 frames per second"), and finally space constructed from separate image layers.

In contrast, cinema works hard to erase any traces of its own production process, including any indication that the images we see could have been constructed rather than recorded. It denies that the reality it shows often does not exist outside of the film image, the image which was arrived at by photographing an already impossible space, itself put together with the use of models, mirrors, and matte paintings, and which was then combined with other images through optical printing. It pretends to be a simple recording of an already existing reality-both to a viewer and to itself.[6] Cinema's public image stressed the aura of reality "captured" on film, thus implying that cinema was about photographing what existed before the camera, rather than "creating the 'never-was'" of special effects.[7] Rear projection and blue-screen photography, matte paintings and glass shots, mirrors and miniatures, push development, optical effects and other techniques which allowed filmmakers to construct and alter the moving images, and thus could reveal that cinema was not really different from animation, were pushed to cinema's periphery by its practitioners, historians, and critics.[8] Today, with the shift to digital media, these marginalized techniques move to the center.
What is Digital Cinema?
A visible sign of this shift is the new role that computer-generated special effects have come to play in Hollywood industry in the last few years. Many recent blockbusters have been driven by special effects, feeding on their popularity. Hollywood has even created a new mini-genre of "The Making of" videos and books, which reveal how special effects are created.

I will use special effects from a few recent Hollywood films for illustrations of some of the possibilities of digital filmmaking. Until recently, Hollywood studios were the only ones who had the money to pay for digital tools and for the labor involved in producing digital effects. However, the shift to digital media affects not just Hollywood, but filmmaking as a whole. As traditional film technology is universally being replaced by digital technology, the logic of the filmmaking process is being redefined. What I describe below are the new principles of digital filmmaking, which are equally valid for individual or collective film productions, regardless of whether they are using the most expensive professional hardware and software or amateur equivalents. Consider, then, the following principles of digital filmmaking:

Rather than filming physical reality it is now possible to generate film-like scenes directly in a computer with the help of 3-D computer animation. Therefore, live-action footage is displaced from its role as the only possible material from which the finished film is constructed.

Once live-action footage is digitized (or directly recorded in a digital format), it loses its privileged indexical relationship to pro-filmic reality. The computer does not distinguish between an image obtained through the photographic lens, an image created in a paint program, or an image synthesized in a 3-D graphics package, since they are made from the same material-pixels. And pixels, regardless of their origin, can be easily altered, substituted one for another, and so on. Live-action footage is reduced to just another graphic, no different from images that were created manually.[9]

If live-action footage was left intact in traditional filmmaking, now it functions as raw material for further compositing, animating, and morphing. As a result, while retaining visual realism unique to the photographic process, film obtains the plasticity that was previously only possible in painting or animation. To use the suggestive title of a popular morphing software, digital filmmakers work with "elastic reality." For example, the opening shot of Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis 1994; special effects by Industrial Light and Magic) tracks an unusually long and extremely intricate flight of a feather. To create the shot, the real feather was filmed against a blue background in different positions; this material was then animated and composited against shots of a landscape.[10] The result: a new kind of realism, which can be described as "something that looks as if it is intended to look exactly as if it could have happened, although it really could not."

Previously, editing and special effects were strictly separate activities. An editor worked on ordering sequences of images together; any intervention within an image was handled by special-effects specialists. The computer collapses this distinction. The manipulation of individual images via a paint program or algorithmic image processing becomes as easy as arranging sequences of images in time. Both simply involve "cut and paste." As this basic computer command exemplifies, modification of digital images (or other digitized data) is not sensitive to distinctions of time and space or of differences of scale. Thus, re-ordering sequences of images in time, compositing them together in space, modifying parts of an individual image, and changing individual pixels become the same operation, conceptually and practically.

Given the preceding principles, we can define digital film in this way:

digital film = live action material + painting + image processing + compositing + 2-D computer animation + 3-D computer animation

Live-action material can be recorded either on film or video or directly in a digital format.[11] Painting, image processing, and computer animation refer to the processes of modifying already existent images as well as creating new ones. In fact, the very distinction between creation and modification, so clear in film-based media (shooting versus darkroom processes in photography, production versus post-production in cinema) no longer applies to digital cinema, since each image, regardless of its origin, goes through a number of programs before making it to the final film.[12]

Let us summarize the principles discussed thus far. Live action footage is now only raw material to be manipulated by hand: animated, combined with 3-D computer-generated scenes, and painted over. The final images are constructed manually from different elements, and all the elements are either created entirely from scratch or modified by hand.

We can finally answer the question "What is digital cinema?" Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements.

This can be re-read in view of the history of the moving image sketched earlier. Manual construction and animation of images gave birth to cinema and slipped into the margins, only to re-appear as the foundation of digital cinema. The history of the moving image thus comes full circle. Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular case of animation in the end.

The relationship between "normal" filmmaking and special effects is similarly reversed. Special effects, which involved human intervention into machine-recorded footage and which were therefore delegated to cinema's periphery throughout its history, become the norm of digital filmmaking.

The same applies for the relationship between production and post-production. Cinema traditionally involved arranging physical reality to be filmed though the use of sets, models, art direction, cinematography, etc. Occasional manipulation of recorded film (for instance, through optical printing) was negligible compared to the extensive manipulation of reality in front of a camera. In digital filmmaking, shot footage is no longer the final point but just raw material to be manipulated in a computer where the real construction of a scene will take place. In short, the production becomes just the first stage of post-production.

The following examples illustrate this shift from re-arranging reality to re-arranging its images. From the analog era: for a scene in Zabriskie Point (1970), Michelangelo Antonioni, trying to achieve a particularly saturated color, ordered a field of grass to be painted. From the digital era: to create the launch sequence in Apollo 13 (Ron Howard 1995; special effects by Digital Domain), the crew shot footage at the original location of the launch at Cape Canaveral. The artists at Digital Domain scanned the film and altered it on computer workstations, removing recent building construction, adding grass to the launch pad and painting the skies to make them more dramatic. This altered film was then mapped onto 3-D planes to create a virtual set that was animated to match a 180-degree dolly movement of a camera following a rising rocket (see Robertson 20).

The last example brings us to yet another conceptualization of digital cinema-as painting. In his book-length study of digital photography, William J.T. Mitchell focuses our attention on what he calls the inherent mutability of a digital image:

The essential characteristic of digital information is that it can be manipulated easily and very rapidly by computer. It is simply a matter of substituting new digits for old. . . . Computational tools for transforming, combining, altering, and analyzing images are as essential to the digital artist as brushes and pigments to a painter. (7)

As Mitchell points out, this inherent mutability erases the difference between a photograph and a painting. Since a film is a series of photographs, it is appropriate to extend Mitchell's argument to digital film. With an artist being able to easily manipulate digitized footage either as a whole or frame by frame, a film in a general sense becomes a series of paintings.[13]

Hand-painting digitized film frames, made possible by a computer, is probably the most dramatic example of the new status of cinema. No longer strictly locked in the photographic, it opens itself towards the painterly. It is also the most obvious example of the return of cinema to its 19th-century origins-in this case, to hand-crafted images of magic lantern slides, the Phenakistiscope, the Zoetrope.

We usually think of computerization as automation, but here the result is the reverse: what was previously automatically recorded by a camera now has to be painted one frame at a time. But not just a dozen images, as in the 19th century, but thousands and thousands. We can draw another parallel with the practice, common in the early days of silent cinema, of manually tinting film frames in different colors according to a scene's mood (see Robinson 165). Today, some of the most visually sophisticated digital effects are often achieved using the same simple method: painstakingly altering by hand thousands of frames. The frames are painted over either to create mattes (hand-drawn matte extraction) or to directly change the images, as in Forrest Gump, where President Kennedy was made to speak new sentences by altering the shape of his lips, one frame at a time.[14] In principle, given enough time and money, one can create what will be the ultimate digital film: 90 minutes, i.e. 129,600 frames, completely painted by hand from scratch, but indistinguishable in appearance from live photography.[15]
Multimedia as "Primitive" Digital Cinema
3-D animation, compositing, mapping, paint retouching: in commercial cinema, these radical new techniques are mostly used to solve technical problems while traditional cinematic language is preserved unchanged. Frames are hand-painted to remove wires that supported an actor during shooting; a flock of birds is added to a landscape; a city street is filled with crowds of simulated extras. Although most Hollywood releases now involve digitally manipulated scenes, the use of computers is always carefully hidden.[16]

Commercial narrative cinema still continues to hold on to the classical realist style where images function as unretouched photographic records of events that took place in front of the camera.[17] Cinema refuses to give up its unique cinema effect, an effect which, according to Metz's penetrating analysis made in the 1970s, depends upon narrative form, the reality effect, and cinema's architectural arrangement all working together.

Towards the end of his essay, Metz wonders whether in the future non-narrative films may become more numerous; if this happens, he suggests that cinema will no longer need to manufacture its reality effect. Electronic and digital media have already brought about this transformation. Beginning in the 1980s, new cinematic forms have emerged that are not linear narratives, that are exhibited on a television or a computer screen, rather than in a movie theater-and that simultaneously give up cinematic realism.

What are these forms? First of all, there is the music video. Probably not by accident, the genre of music video came into existence exactly at the time when electronic video effects devices were entering editing studios. Importantly, just as music videos often incorporate narratives within them, but are not linear narratives from start to finish, they rely on film (or video) images, but change them beyond the norms of traditional cinematic realism. The manipulation of images through hand-painting and image processing, hidden in Hollywood cinema, is brought into the open on a television screen. Similarly, the construction of an image from heterogeneous sources is not subordinated to the goal of photorealism but functions as an aesthetic strategy. The genre of music video has been a laboratory for exploring numerous new possibilities of manipulating photographic images made possible by computers-the numerous points which exist in the space between the 2-D and the 3-D, cinematography and painting, photographic realism and collage. In short, it is a living and constantly expanding textbook for digital cinema (see Shaviro, " Splitting the Atom " in this volume).

A detailed analysis of the evolution of music video imagery (or, more generally, broadcast graphics in the electronic age) deserves a separate treatment, and I will not try to take it up here. Instead, I will discuss another new cinematic non-narrative form, CD-ROM games, which, in contrast to music video, relied on the computer for storage and distribution from the very beginning. And, unlike music video designers who were consciously pushing traditional film or video images into something new, the designers of CD-ROMs arrived at a new visual language unintentionally while attempting to emulate traditional cinema.

In the late 1980s, Apple began to promote the concept of computer multimedia; and in 1991 it released QuickTime software to enable an ordinary personal computer to play movies. However, for the next few years the computer did not perform its new role very well. First, CD-ROMs could not hold anything close to the length of a standard theatrical film. Secondly, the computer would not smoothly play a movie larger than the size of a stamp. Finally, the movies had to be compressed, degrading their visual appearance. Only in the case of still images was the computer able to display photographic-type detail at full screen size.

Because of these particular hardware limitations, the designers of CD-ROMs had to invent a different kind of cinematic language in which a range of strategies, such as discrete motion, loops, and superimposition, previously used in 19th-century moving-image presentations, in 20th-century animation, and in the avant-garde tradition of graphic cinema, were applied to photographic or synthetic images. This language synthesized cinematic illusionism and the aesthetics of graphic collage, with its characteristic heterogeneity and discontinuity. The photographic and the graphic, divorced when cinema and animation went their separate ways, met again on a computer screen.

The graphic also met the cinematic. The designers of CD-ROMs were aware of the techniques of 20th-century cinematography and film editing, but they had to adopt these techniques both to an interactive format and to hardware limitations. As a result, the techniques of modern cinema and of 19th-century moving images have merged in a new hybrid language.

We can trace the development of this language by analyzing a few well-known CD-ROM titles. The bestselling game Myst (Broderbund, 1993) unfolds its narrative strictly through still images, a practice which takes us back to magic lantern shows (and to Chris Marker's La Jetée).[18] But in other ways Myst relies on the techniques of 20th-century cinema. For instance, the CD-ROM uses simulated camera turns to switch from one image to the next. It also employs the basic technique of film editing to subjectively speed up or slow down time. In the course of the game, the user moves around a fictional island by clicking on a mouse. Each click advances a virtual camera forward, revealing a new view of a 3-D environment. When the user begins to descend into the underground chambers, the spatial distance between the points of view of each two consecutive views decreases sharply. If earlier the user was able to cross a whole island with just a few clicks, now it takes a dozen clicks to get to the bottom of the stairs! In other words, just as in traditional cinema, Myst slows down time to create suspense and tension.

In Myst, miniature animations are sometimes embedded within the still images. In the next bestselling CD-ROM 7th Guest (Virgin Games, 1993), the user is presented with video clips of live actors superimposed over static backgrounds created with 3-D computer graphics. The clips are looped, and the moving human figures clearly stand out against the backgrounds. Both of these features connect the visual language of 7th Guest to 19th-century pre-cinematic devices and 20th-century cartoons rather than to cinematic verisimilitude. But like Myst, 7th Guest also evokes distinctly modern cinematic codes. The environment where all action takes place (an interior of a house) is rendered using a wide-angle lens; to move from one view to the next, a camera follows a complex curve, as though mounted on a virtual dolly.

Next, consider the CD-ROM Johnny Mnemonic (Sony Imagesoft, 1995). Produced to complement the fiction film of the same title, marketed not as a "game" but as an "interactive movie," and featuring full-screen video throughout, it comes closer to cinematic realism than the previous CD-ROMs-yet it is still quite distinct from it. With all action shot against a green screen and then composited with graphic backgrounds, its visual style exists within a space between cinema and collage.

It would not be entirely inappropriate to read this short history of the digital moving image as a teleological development which replays the emergence of cinema a hundred years earlier. Indeed, as computers' speed keeps increasing, the CD-ROM designers have been able to go from a slide show format to the superimposition of small moving elements over static backgrounds and finally to full-frame moving images. This evolution repeats the 19th-century progression: from sequences of still images (magic lantern slide presentations) to moving characters over static backgrounds (for instance, in Reynaud's Praxinoscope Theater) to full motion (the Lumières' cinematograph). Moreover, the introduction of QuickTime in 1991 can be compared to the introduction of the Kinetoscope in 1892: both were used to present short loops, both featured the images approximately two by three inches in size, both called for private viewing rather than collective exhibition. Finally, the Lumières' first film screenings of 1895, which shocked their audiences with huge moving images, found their parallel in CD-ROM titles of 1995, where the moving image finally fills the entire computer screen. Thus, exactly a hundred years after cinema was officially "born," it was reinvented on a computer screen.

But this is only one reading. We no longer think of the history of cinema as a linear march towards only one possible language, or as a progression towards more and more accurate verisimilitude. Rather, we have come to see its history as a succession of distinct and equally expressive languages, each with its own aesthetic variables, each new language closing off some of the possibilities of the previous one-a cultural logic not dissimilar to Kuhn's analysis of scientific paradigms. Similarly, instead of dismissing visual strategies of early multimedia titles as a result of technological limitations, we may want to think of them as an alternative to traditional cinematic illusionism, as a beginning of digital cinema's new language.

For the computer/entertainment industry, these strategies represent only a temporary limitation, an annoying drawback that needs to be overcome. This is one important difference between the situation at the end of the nineteenth and the end of the twentieth centuries: if cinema was developing towards the still open horizon of many possibilities, the development of commercial multimedia, and of corresponding computer hardware (compression boards, storage formats such as Digital Video Disk), is driven by a clearly defined goal: the exact duplication of cinematic realism. So if a computer screen, more and more, emulates a cinema screen, this not an accident but a result of conscious planning.
The Loop and Spatial Montage
A number of artists, however, have approached these strategies not as limitations but as a source of new cinematic possibilities. As an example, I will discuss the use of the loop and of montage in Jean-Louis Boissier's Flora petrinsularis (1993) and in my own Little Movies (1994-).[19]

As already mentioned, all 19th-century pre-cinematic devices, up to Edison's Kinetoscope, were based on short loops. As "the seventh art" began to mature, it banished the loop to the low-art realms of the instructional film, the pornographic peep-show, and the animated cartoon. In contrast, narrative cinema has avoided repetitions; like modern Western fictional forms in general, it put forward a notion of human existence as a linear progression through numerous unique events.

Cinema's birth from a loop form was reenacted at least once during its history. In one of the sequences of the revolutionary Soviet montage film, A Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Dziga Vertov shows us a cameraman standing in the back of a moving automobile. As he is being carried forward by an automobile, he cranks the handle of his camera. A loop, a repetition, created by the circular movement of the handle, gives birth to a progression of events-a very basic narrative which is also quintessentially modern: a camera moving through space recording whatever is in its way. In what seems to be a reference to cinema's primal scene, these shots are intercut with the shots of a moving train. Vertov even re-stages the terror which the Lumières' film supposedly provoked in its audience; he positions his camera right along the train track so the train runs over our point of view a number of times, crushing us again and again.

Early digital movies share the same limitations of storage as 19th-century pre-cinematic devices. This is probably why the loop playback function was built into the QuickTime interface, thus giving it the same weight as the VCR-style "play forward" function. So, in contrast to films and videotapes, QuickTime movies are supposed to be played forward, backward, or looped.

Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age? It is relevant to recall that the loop gave birth not only to cinema but also to computer programming. Programming involves altering the linear flow of data through control structures, such as "if/then" and "repeat/while"; the loop is the most elementary of these control structures. If we strip the computer from its usual interface and follow the execution of a typical computer program, the computer will reveal itself to be another version of Ford's factory, with a loop as its conveyer belt.

Flora petrinsularis realizes some of the possibilities contained in the loop form, suggesting a new temporal aesthetics for digital cinema. The CD-ROM, which is based on Rousseau's Confessions, opens with a white screen, containing a numbered list. Clicking on each item leads us to a screen containing two frames, positioned side by side. Both frames show the same video loop but are slightly offset from each other in time. Thus, the images appearing in the left frame reappear in a moment on the right and vice versa, as though an invisible wave is running through the screen. This wave soon becomes materialized: when we click on one of the frames we are taken to a new screen showing a loop of a rhythmically vibrating water surface. As each mouse click reveals another loop, the viewer becomes an editor, but not in a traditional sense. Rather than constructing a singular narrative sequence and discarding material which is not used, here the viewer brings to the forefront, one by one, numerous layers of looped actions which seem to be taking place all at once, a multitude of separate but co-existing temporalities. The viewer is not cutting but re-shuffling. In a reversal of Vertov's sequence where a loop generated a narrative, the viewer's attempt to create a story in Flora petrinsularis leads to a loop.

The loop that structures Flora petrinsularis on a number of levels becomes a metaphor for human desire that can never achieve resolution. It can be also read as a comment on cinematic realism. What are the minimal conditions necessary to create the impression of reality? As Boissier demonstrates, in the case of a field of grass, a close-up of a plant or a stream, just a few looped frames become sufficient to produce the illusion of life and of linear time.

Stephen Neale describes how early film demonstrated its authenticity by representing moving nature: "What was lacking [in photographs] was the wind, the very index of real, natural movement. Hence the obsessive contemporary fascination, not just with movement, not just with scale, but also with waves and sea spray, with smoke and spray" (52). What for early cinema was its biggest pride and achievement-a faithful documentation of nature's movement-becomes for Boissier a subject of ironic and melancholic simulation. As the few frames are looped over and over, we see blades of grass shifting slightly back and forth, rhythmically responding to the blow of non-existent wind that is almost approximated by the noise of a computer reading data from a CD-ROM.

Something else is being simulated here as well, perhaps unintentionally. As you watch the CD-ROM, the computer periodically staggers, unable to maintain a consistent data rate. As a result, the images on the screen move in uneven bursts, slowing and speeding up with human-like irregularity. It is as though they are brought to life not by a digital machine but by a human operator, cranking the handle of the Zoetrope a century and a half ago.

Little Movies is my own project about the aesthetics of digital cinema, and a eulogy to its earliest form-QuickTime. Beginning with the well-known supposition that every new medium relies on the content of previous media, Little Movies features key moments in the history of cinema as its logical subject.

As the time passes, the medium becomes the message, that is, the "look" more than the content of any media technology of the past is what lingers on. Little Movies reads digital media of the 1990s from a hypothetical future, foregrounding its basic properties: the pixel, the computer screen, the scanlines. As described earlier, in the early 1890s the public patronized Kinetoscope parlors where peep-hole machines presented them with the latest marvel-tiny moving photographs arranged in short loops. And exactly a hundred years later, we are equally fascinated with tiny QuickTime movies-the precursor of digital cinema still to come. Drawing a parallel between these two historical moments, Little Movies are explicitly modeled after Kinetoscope films: they are also short loops.

Like Boissier, I am also interested in exploring alternatives to cinematic montage, in my case replacing its traditional sequential mode with a spatial one. Ford's assembly line relied on the separation of the production process into a set of repetitive, sequential, and simple activities. The same principle made computer programming possible: a computer program breaks a task into a series of elemental operations to be executed one at a time. Cinema followed this principle as well: it replaced all other modes of narration with a sequential narrative, an assembly line of shots that appear on the screen one at a time. A sequential narrative turned out to be particularly incompatible with a spatialized narrative, which played a prominent role in European visual culture for centuries. From Giotto's fresco cycle at Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padua to Courbet's A Burial at Ornans, artists presented a multitude of separate events (which were sometimes even separated by time) within a single composition. In contrast to cinema's narratives, here all the "shots" were accessible to a viewer at one.

Cinema has elaborated complex techniques of montage between different images replacing each other in time; but the possibility of what can be called "spatial montage" between simultaneously co-existing images was not explored. In Little Movies I begin to explore this direction in order to open up again the tradition of spatialized narrative suppressed by cinema. In one of the movies I develop the narrative through a number of short video clips, all much smaller in size than the computer screen. This allows me to place a number of clips on the screen at once. Sometimes all the clips are paused, and only one clip is playing; at other times two or three different clips play at once. As the narrative activates different parts of the screen, montage in time gives way to montage in space. Or rather, we can say that montage acquires a new spatial dimension. In addition to montage dimensions already explored by cinema (differences in images' content, composition, movement) we now have a new dimension: the position of the images in space in relation to each other. In addition, since images do not replace each other (as in cinema) but remain on the screen throughout the movie, each new image is juxtaposed not just with one image which preceded it, but with all the other images present on the screen.

The logic of replacement, characteristic of cinema, gives way to the logic of addition and co-existence. Time becomes spatialized, distributed over the surface of the screen. Nothing is forgotten, nothing is erased. Just as we use computers to accumulate endless texts, messages, notes, and data (and just as a person, going through life, accumulates more and more memories, with the past slowly acquiring more weight than the future), "spatial montage" accumulates events and images as it progresses through its narrative. In contrast to cinema's screen, which primarily functioned as a record of perception, here the computer screen functions as a record of memory.

By making images different in size and by having them appear and disappear in different parts of the screen without any obvious order, I want to present the computer screen as a space of endless possibilities. Rather than being a surface that passively accepts projected images of reality recorded by a camera, the computer screen becomes an active generator of moving-image events. It already contains numerous images and numerous narrative paths; all that remains is to reveal some of them.
Conclusion: From Kino-Eye to Kino-Brush
In the 20th century, cinema has played two roles at once. As a media technology, cinema's role was to capture and to store visible reality. The difficulty of modifying images once they were recorded was exactly what gave cinema its value as a document, assuring its authenticity. The same rigidity of the film image has defined the limits of cinema as I defined it earlier, i.e. the super-genre of live action narrative. Although it includes within itself a variety of styles-the result of the efforts of many directors, designers, and cinematographers-these styles share a strong family resemblance. They are all children of the recording process that uses lenses, regular sampling of time, and photographic media. They are all children of a machine vision.

The mutability of digital data impairs the value of cinematic recordings as documents of reality. In retrospect, we can see that 20th-century cinema's regime of visual realism, the result of automatically recording visual reality, was only an exception, an isolated accident in the history of visual representation which has always involved, and now again involves, the manual construction of images. Cinema becomes a particular branch of painting-painting in time. No longer a kino-eye, but a kino-brush.[20]

The privileged role played by the manual construction of images in digital cinema is one example of a larger trend: the return of pre-cinematic moving images techniques. Marginalized by the 20th-century institution of live-action narrative cinema that relegated them to the realms of animation and special effects, these techniques reemerge as the foundation of digital filmmaking. What was supplemental to cinema becomes its norm; what was at its boundaries comes into the center. Digital media return to us the repressed of the cinema.

As the examples discussed in this essay suggest, the directions that were closed off at the turn of the century, when cinema came to dominate the modern moving-image culture, are now again beginning to be explored. Moving-image culture is being redefined once again; cinematic realism is being displaced from being its dominant mode to become only one option among many.
Works Cited
Artintact 1. Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 1994. CD-ROM.

Aumont, Jacques, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie, and Marc Vernet. Aesthetics of Film. Trans. Richard Neupert. Austin: U of Texas P, 1992. Print.

Billups, Scott. "Casting from Forest Lawn (Future of Performers)." Annual Artists Rights Digital Technology Symposium. Directors Guild of America, Los Angeles. 16 Feb. 1996. Address.

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Print.

Bukatman, Scott. "The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime." Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances. Eds. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen. Seattle: Bay P, 1995. 255-89. Print.

Ceram, C.W. Archaeology of the Cinema. New York: Harcourt, 1965. Print.

Huhtamo, Erkki. "Encapsulated Bodies in Motion: Simulators and the Quest for Total Immersion." Critical Issues in Electronic Media. Ed. Simon Penny. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. 159-86. Print.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd. ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970. Print.

Leish, Kenneth W. Cinema. New York: Newsweek Books, 1974. Print.

Lunenfeld, Peter. "Art Post-History: Digital Photography and Electronic Semiotics." Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age. Eds. Hubertus von Amelunxen, Stefan Inglhaut, and Florian Rötzer. Sydney: G+B Arts, 1996. Print.

Manovich, Lev. "Cinema and Digital Media." Perspektiven der Medienkunst/Media Art Perspectives. Eds. Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwarz. Ostfildern: Cantz, 1996. Print.

-. "Engineering Vision: from Constructivism to the Computer." Diss. U of Rochester, 1993. Web. <https://www.academia.edu/2800644/The_Engineering_of_Vision_from_Constructivism_to_Computers>.

-. "To Lie and to Act: Potemkin's Villages, Cinema and Telepresence." Mythos Information-Welcome to the Wired World: Ars Electronica 95. Eds. Karl Gebel and Peter Weibel. Vienna: Springer, 1995. 343-48. Print.

-. "What is Digital Cinema?" Telepolis, 21 May 1996. Web. <http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/6/6110/1.html>. Rpt. in The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Ed. Peter Lunenfeld. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000. 173-92. Rpt. in Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Eds. Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith. New York: Routledge, 2006. 221-38.

Marker, Chris. La Jetée: Ciné-roman. New York: Zone, 1992. Print.

Metz, Christian. "The Fiction Film and its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study." Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus-Selected Writings. Ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. New York: Tanam P, 1980. 373-409. Print.

Mitchell, William J. T. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. Print.

Monaco, James. How to Read a Film. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1981. Print.

Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Print.

Neale, Stephen. Cinema and Technology. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. Print.

Perisi, Paula. "The New Hollywood Silicon Stars." Wired Dec. 1995: 142+. Print.

Petrovich, Lucy, et al., eds. SIGGRAPH '94 Visual Proceedings. New York: ACM SIGGRAPH, 1994. Print.

Robertson, Barbara. "Digital Magic: Apollo 13." Computer Graphics World Aug. 1995: 20. Print.

Robinson, David. From Peep Show to Palace: the Birth of American Film. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Print.

Russett, Robert, and Cecile Starr. Experimental Animation. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976. Print.

Samuelson, David. Motion Picture Camera Techniques. London: Focal P, 1978. Print.

Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. Print.

Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, 2nd ed. New York: Ungar, 1987. Print.

Vertov, Dziga. "Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye." 1924. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Trans. Kevin O'Brien. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. 47-49. Print.
Notes
This essay was first published in 1996, in the German online magazine Telepolis, and has been reprinted, in modified form, in two book publications (see works cited). The version reprinted here, however, has appeared only on Manovich's website.

[1] This is the third in a series of essays on digital cinema. See my "Cinema and Digital Media" and "To Lie and to Act: Potemkin's Villages, Cinema and Telepresence." This essay has greatly benefited from the suggestions and criticisms of Natalie Bookchin, Peter Lunenfeld, Norman Klein, and Vivian Sobchack. I also would like to acknowledge the pioneering work of Erkki Huhtamo on the connections between early cinema and digital media which stimulated my own interest in this topic. See, for instance, his "Encapsulated Bodies in Motion."

[2] The remarks were made by Scott Billups, a major figure in bringing Hollywood and Silicon Valley together by way of the American Film Institute's Apple Laboratory and Advanced Technologies Programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s (see Billups; also Perisi).

[3] Cinema as defined by its "super-genre" of fictional live action film belongs to media arts, which, in contrast to traditional arts, rely on recordings of reality as their basis. Another term which is not as popular as "media arts" but is perhaps more precise is "recording arts." For the use of this term, see Monaco 7.

[4] The birth of cinema in the 1890s is accompanied by an interesting transformation: while the body as the generator of moving pictures disappears, it simultaneously becomes their new subject. Indeed, one of the key themes of early films produced by Edison is a human body in motion: a man sneezing, the famous bodybuilder Sandow flexing his muscles, an athlete performing somersaults, a woman dancing. Films of boxing matches play a key role in the commercial development of the Kinetoscope. See Musser 72-79; Robinson 44-48.

[5] This arrangement was previously used in magic lantern projections; it is described in the second edition of Althanasius Kircher's Ars magna (1671). See Musser 21-22.

[6] The extent of this lie is made clear by the films of Andy Warhol from the first part of the 1960s-perhaps the only real attempt to create cinema without a language.

[7] I have borrowed this definition of special effects from Samuelson.

[8] The following examples illustrate this disavowal of special effects; other examples can be easily found. The first example is from popular discourse on cinema. A section entitled "Making the Movies" in Leish's Cinema contains short stories from the history of the movie industry. The heroes of these stories are actors, directors, and producers; special effects artists are mentioned only once. The second example is from an academic source: the authors of the authoritative Aesthetics of Film state that "[t]he goal of our book is to summarize from a synthetic and didactic perspective the diverse theoretical attempts at examining these empirical notions [terms from the lexicon of film technicians], including ideas like frame vs. shot, terms from production crews' vocabularies, the notion of identification produced by critical vocabulary, etc." (Aumont et al. 7). The fact that the text never mentions special effects techniques reflects the general lack of any historical or theoretical interest in the topic by film scholars. Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art: An Introduction, which is used as a standard textbook in undergraduate film classes is a little better as it devotes three of its five hundred pages to special effects. Finally, a relevant piece of statistics: a library at the University of California, San Diego contains 4273 titles catalogued under the subject "motion pictures" and only 16 tiles under "special effects cinematography." For the few important works addressing the larger cultural significance of special effects by film theoreticians see Sobchack; Bukatman. Norman Klein is currently working on a history of special effects environments.

[9] For a discussion of the subsumption of the photographic to the graphic, see Lunenfeld.

[10] For a complete list of people at ILM who worked on this film, see the SIGGRAPH '94 Visual Proceedings (Petrovich et al. 19).

[11] In this respect 1995 can be called the last year of digital media. At the 1995 National Association of Broadcasters convention Avid showed a working model of a digital video camera which records not on a video cassette but directly onto a hard drive. Once digital cameras become widely used, we will no longer have any reason to talk about digital media since the process of digitization will be eliminated.

[12] Here is another, even more radical definition: digital film = f (x, y, t). This definition would be greeted with joy by the proponents of abstract animation. Since the computer breaks down every frame into pixels, a complete film can be defined as a function which, given the horizontal, vertical, and time location of each pixel, returns its color. This is actually how a computer represents a film, a representation which has a surprising affinity with a certain well-known avant-garde vision of cinema! For a computer, a film is an abstract arrangement of colors changing in time, rather than something structured by "shots," "narrative," "actors," and so on.

[13] The full advantage of mapping time into 2-D space, already present in Edison's first cinema apparatus, is now realized: one can modify events in time by literally painting on a sequence of frames, treating them as a single image.

[14] See "Industrial Light & Magic alters history with MATADOR," promotional material by Parallax Software, SIGGRAPH '95 Conference, Los Angeles, August 1995.

[15] The reader who followed my analysis of the new possibilities of digital cinema may wonder why I have stressed the parallels between digital cinema and the pre-cinematic techniques of the 19th century but did not mention 20th-century avant-garde filmmaking. Did not the avant-garde filmmakers already explore many of these new possibilities? To take the notion of cinema as painting, Len Lye, one of the pioneers of abstract animation, was painting directly on film as early as 1935; he was followed by Norman McLaren and Stan Brakhage, the latter extensively covering shot footage with dots, scratches, splattered paint, smears, and lines in an attempt to turn his films into equivalents of Abstract Expressionist painting. More generally, one of the major impulses in all of avant-garde filmmaking, from Léger to Godard, was to combine the cinematic, the painterly, and the graphic-by using live-action footage and animation within one film or even a single frame, by altering this footage in a variety of ways, or by juxtaposing printed texts and filmed images.

I explore the notion that the avant-garde anticipated digital aesthetics in my "Engineering Vision: from Constructivism to the Computer"; here I would like to bring up one point particularly relevant for this essay. When the avant-garde filmmakers collaged multiple images within a single frame, or painted and scratched film, or revolted against the indexical identity of cinema in other ways, they were working against "normal" filmmaking procedures and the intended uses of film technology. (Film stock was not designed to be painted on.) Thus they operated on the periphery of commercial cinema not only aesthetically but also technically.

One general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer. Digital cinema technology is a case in point. The avant-garde strategy of collage reemerged as a "cut and paste" command, the most basic operation one can perform on digital data. The idea of painting on film became embedded in paint functions of film-editing software. The avant-garde move to combine animation, printed texts, and live-action footage is repeated in the convergence of animation, title generation, paint, compositing, and editing systems into single all-in-one packages. Finally, another move to combine a number of film images together within one frame (for instance, in Léger's 1924 Ballet Mécanique or in Vertov's 1929 A Man with a Movie Camera) also become legitimized by technology, since all editing software, including Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Flame, and Cineon, by default assumes that a digital image consists of a number of separate image layers. All in all, what used to be exceptions for traditional cinema became the normal, intended techniques of digital filmmaking, embedded in technology design itself. For the experiments in painting on film by Lye, McLaren, and Brakhage, see Russett and Starr 65-71; 117-128; also Sitney 230; 136-227.

[16] Reporting in the December 1995 issue of Wired, Paula Perisi writes: "A decade ago, only an intrepid few, led by George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, were doing high-quality digital work. Now computer imaging is considered an indispensable production tool for all films, from the smallest drama to the largest visual extravaganza" (144).

[17] Therefore, one way in which the fantastic is justified in contemporary Hollywood cinema is through the introduction of various non-human characters such as aliens, mutants, and robots. We never notice the pure arbitrariness of their colorful and mutating bodies, the beams of energy emulating from their eyes, the whirlpools of particles emulating from their wings, because they are made perceptually consistent with the set, i.e. they look like something which could have existed in a three-dimensional space and therefore could have been photographed.

[18] This 28-minute film, made in 1962, is composed of still frames narrativized in time, and concludes with a very short live action sequence. For documentation, see Marker.

[19] Flora petrinsularis is included in the compilation CD-ROM Artintact 1. Little Movies are available online at < http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~manovich/little-movies>.

[20] It was Dziga Vertov who coined the term "kino-eye" in the 1920s to describe the cinematic apparatus's ability "to record and organize the individual characteristics of life's phenomena into a whole, an essence, a conclusion" (47). For Vertov, the presentation of film "facts," based as they were on materialist evidence, defined the very nature of the cinema.

Lev Manovich is the author of seven books including Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), which was described as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." Manovich is a Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Software Studies Initiative that works on the analysis and visualization of big visual cultural data. In 2013 he appeared on the list of "25 People Shaping the Future of Design." In 2014 he was included in the list of "50 Most Interesting People Building the Future" ( The Verge).

Lev Manovich, "What is Digital Cinema?" in Denson and Leyda (eds), Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016). Web. < https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/1-1-manovich/>. ISBN 978-0-9931996-2-2 (online)

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BY LEV MANOVICH Thus far, most discussions of cinema in the digital age have focused on the possibilities of interactive narrative. It is not hard to understand why: since the majority of viewers and critics equate cinema with storytelling, digital media is understood as something that will let cinema tell its stories in a new way.

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Dogme 95 was an independent filmmaking movement created by Danish film directors Lars von Trier, known for Dogville and and Thomas Vinterberg, known for and Another Round, both starring Mads Mikkelsen, in an attempt to rebel against the ever-growing commercial systems in cinema. Founded in 1995, the two independent filmmakers documented a manifesto highlighting ten rules identified as the Vows of Chasity. These rules would effectively strip down the filmmaking process to its bare bones to draw out every last inch of creativity from its limited resources.

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The first film to receive the Dogme 95 certificate of authenticity would be Vinterberg's or The Celebration, a dark comedy that follows a family convening for the patriarch's birthday party only to dive into drunken confessions about their family's troubled past. The raw, analog style of filmmaking can be jarring and uncomfortably real, but this style of filmmaking has lingered on in Vinterberg and Trier's works as they often deliver performance-based films that deal with dark themes of everyday life.

Rule #1, It Must Be Shot On Location

"Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found)." In essence, this rule would deter the filmmakers from being able to manipulate the environment but instead work with it and depict its setting in proper form.

As strict as these many rules may sound, even the filmmakers admitted to some transgressions. Vinterberg stated a prop may have made its way onto set once or twice while shooting, and a window was slightly altered to affect the lighting during the filming of Festen. Nevertheless, the one or two fragrant violations committed by these rebellious filmmakers are nothing to the production of a big-budget studio.

Rule #2, Sound Must Be Naturally Recorded

"The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot)." A similar term is "diegetic sound." For example, if a scene features a stereo playing a song within the film, this music coming from the stereo is diegetic instead of simply playing over the film. However, Dogme 95 takes it one step further, in which the stereo must be playing and recorded while on set.

This is another instance where some music has been used in a Dogme 95 film, but for the vast majority, it's simply on-set captured sounds and dialogue; that's it. This rule also cancels out foley sound, the art of creating sound effects like footsteps or clashing swords in post-production. All sound must be recorded on set and within the same shot it was recorded in, cut away from the speaker while editing, and that dialogue must stop.

Rule #3, The Camera Must Be Hand Held

"The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or mobility attainable in the hand is permitted." Yep, that means no tripods, dollys, or cranes; the camera must be held by hand. DV cameras were often used, lightweight, and easily held, like your parent's old home video camera they took on vacations or to your class recital. Hang upside down, run alongside your actors; whatever you can do with a camera in your grip was allowed.

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Along with this limited mobility and grounded camera movements, the rules also didn't allow the use of stunts. No wire work or complex transitions or camera handoffs from drones to vehicles like audiences have come to see nowadays in action flicks. What did occur was the shaky-cam trait where the handheld movement, especially in altercations or emotional flare-ups, would be best depicted through sporadic handheld camera motion.

Rule #4, Special Lighting Is Not Acceptable

"The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure, the scene must be cut or a single lamp to be attached to the camera)." Lighting is a critical component of any film production, so along with simple DV cameras, poor lighting was a common trait among Dogme 95 films, furthering the home movie aesthetic. However, this also forced the filmmakers to troubleshoot, often to creative lengths.

At times films were even limited to using a candle, maneuvering around the rules surrounding props, to find some light source. However, lighting seems to be the most forgiving of the rules within Dogme 95, being the only one with a stipulation; only when necessary you're allowed a single camera-mounted light. Honor system!

Rule #5, Optical Work Is Forbidden

"Optical work and filters are forbidden." Camera filters are a simple way to change the color tone and expression of the environment. Colored filters placed over a camera's lens can help resemble different environments, like warm tones for dry environments and cool ones for cold. Not allowing filters or color grading is another way to avoid tampering with the on-location environments.

With in-camera tricks and lens filters being forbidden, the film was also not allowed to use animation or digital effects. For the innovative opening credits, the film's title was often written into the environment of the film and shot on camera rather than digitally placed over the picture. This would lead to some interesting titles as forms of abstract art or simply some drawn-on lettering captured on camera.

Rule #6, Superficial Action Cannot Occur

"The film must not contain superficial action. (Murder, weapons, etc. must not occur)." The term superficial is described as a lack of understanding or importance of how serious something is. So, in effect, a simple action like the manifesto lists is a way to disapprove of such mindless actions. This seems like a clear rebellion against cinema's glorification of violence.

Violence was still depicted within Dogme 95 films, but it was derived from emotional confrontations between quarreling adults. However, excessive violence was forbidden, and tension and intensity were channeled into elevated dialogue and stressful situations. Sexual and drunken interactions were also used to spice things up, but the filmmakers could not glorify or romanticize violent actions.

Rule #7, It Must Take Place Here and Now

"Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say, the film takes place here and now)." No period pieces, no flashbacks or glimpses into the future; the film must take place when it was created. So Dogme 95's first film Festen took place in 1998, the same year of its production. This rule seems to want to ground the audience and the filmmakers in the presence and focus on the here and now.

RELATED: Best Indie Movies on Netflix, June 2022

This rule also seemed to anchor the story in reality as it depicts the present. Unlike so many fantasy stories that whisk the audience away for 2 hours of escapism, raw Dogme 95 films keep you tightly grounded to reality, often the unfortunate reality. This rule also seems to play hand in hand with the following rule concerning film style.

Rule #8, No Genre Films

"Genre movies are not acceptable." Genres, a stylistic or thematic category of cinema (think sci-fi, fantasy, gangster films, and so on), were not allowed in Dogme 95 to focus on practical stories in the here and now. No getting your head lost up in the clouds.

Avoiding genres may also be a way to avoid the familiar tropes that come with them. The films of Trier and Vinteberg often dabble in everyday life, and along with the previous here-and-now rule, a genre film can transport your audience far away from their everyday lives and depict similar hero arcs. Dogme 95 seemed to want to keep you here, keep you thinking about the day-to-day issues, and not run away to a long-lost time or idealistic future.

Rule #9, You Must Shoot Academy Style

"The film format must be in Academy 35 mm." Established by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this classic 1.375:1 Academy ratio, more easily recognizable as the 4:3 aspect ratio, was used back in the Silent Film Era. This effectively gives the film ratio a square look, a trait seen before widescreen formats became prevalent in the '50s.

This rule surely looks to throw back to the good old days of classic cinema, maybe a homage to the simpler times. Dogme 95, in its essence, is a way to push filmmaking to its extremes by stripping its process down to its core. So, using the classic Academy ratio format is a way to go back to basics.

Rule #10, The Director Isn't Credited

"The director must not be credited." Move aside Spielberg and Scorsese; audiences don't need to know your name! As budgets ballooned and pockets were getting full across the cinema landscape, Dogme 95 members aimed to strip down the filmmaking process to its extremes and emphasize a meager budget. Acting without the need for recognition may be a way to combat hubris and ego and focus on the creative work, not its spoils.

Dogme 95 was active from 1995 to 2005 and, by its end, expanded beyond Denmark to independent filmmaking pockets worldwide. The Dogme 95 radicals rebelled against the powerhouse studio system, administering their raw, realistic films to the masses with little care for the "norms" they were subjected to. While Dogme 95 has come to a close for all intents and purposes, it made a strong impression on film history by emphasizing low-budget, radical filmmaking and squeezing out every bit of creativity one could muster.

KEEP READING: The History of New Queer Cinema

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Foreign Filmmaking Crash Course: The 10 Rules of "Dogme 95", The Danish Film Movement

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Dogme 95 was an independent filmmaking movement created by Danish film directors Lars von Trier, known for Dogville and and Thomas Vinterberg, known for and Another Round, both starring Mads Mikkelsen , in an attempt to rebel against the ever-growing commercial systems in cinema.

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Last week, I looked at six trends for how the film business is changing. It got a great response and I was heartened to see such interesting, lively debate about it. One of the topics raised by a few people was the move from analog to digital processes. I didn't include the move to digital as a trend because it's not one single thing, with each corner of the industry transitioning at a different pace.

So this week I thought I would take you through a quick tour of when and how various aspects of the film industry moved to digital technology. For some aspects, I have lots of data, while others are a little scant. If you have knowledge or data on anything I'm missing, please get in touch and I'll add it to the piece.

Digital cameras in Hollywood

When most people talk about films 'going digital' they are referring to the move from shooting movies on celluloid film (typically 35mm stock) to digital cameras which capture footage as digital films on a hard drive. Hollywood started to capture films digitally in the 2000s but it wasn't until 2013 that digitally shot films were more common than celluloid productions among the top 100 grossing films.

Although we are moving to entirely new formats, many of the companies that dominated the film camera market back then are still major players. Arri was founded in 1917 and quickly became one of a handful of manufacturers of cameras and lenses used by Hollywood productions. Their first digital camera was the Arri D20 (introduced in 2005), followed by the D21 (in 2008) but it was their Alexa which became by far and away the most commonly-used camera among the largest Hollywood productions.

I have looked at this topic in more detail in the past: Film vs digital - What is Hollywood shooting on?

Digital cameras among independent shorts and features

By their very nature, independent shorts and features are harder to track than big budget Hollywood fare. They are often made by early filmmakers for little money and the vast majority don't get shown at festivals or to the public. This means that it's not possible to definitively say when the majority of independent filmmakers moved to digital. However, last year I was given access to the submission history of the Raindance Film Festival (2002-15) and so I have returned to that dataset to look at the formats used by filmmakers submitting to the festival.

As you can see below, it's not as simple as 'film or digital'. Many independent productions are extremely strapped for cash and so opt for the cheaper option of shooting on tape.

In the early 2000s, the most common tape formats were in standard definition (MiniDV and DigiBeta) but they were soon joined by high definition counterparts (such as HDV and HDCam). Digital overtook film for features in 2010 and a year later for shorts, but tape remained on top, right up to 2015. One thing to bear in mind is that the dates relate to the festival year, so a film submitting to the 2015 festival could have been shot in 2014, or even the tailend of 2013.

For more details, here is the full Raindance piece: Full costs and income of the Raindance Film Festival.

Theatrical release

Another area which benefited greatly from the shift to digital was exhibition. It was much quicker, cheaper and more secure to move a hard drive containing video files than huge cans of physical 35mm stock.

Distributors were keen to use the technology as soon as it was available but cinemas resisted as they were the ones who had to shell out for the new projectors. A compromise was reached whereby distributors pay an additional levy to cinemas when they screen a film digitally, called the Virtual Print Fee. In addition, the UK Film Council established the Digital Screen Network which helped fund the conversion to digital for 250 screens in smaller, regional and independent cinemas.

The two schemes ensured that UK cinemas screens were almost entirely digital by 2013. Pretty good, but still behind Norway and Luxembourg who were the first countries to go completely digital in 2011.

You can read more on this topic here: Digital film distribution in the UK.

Home Entertainment

Last week, the Entertainment Retailers Association announced that 2016 was the first year in which overall digital video spending (i.e. retail and rental) beat spending on physical formats.

It's actually quite hard to get exact figures because, unlike the physical marketplace, the digital marketplace is broad, diverse and often keeps numbers private. In the chart above, physical spend is as reported by The Official Charts Company and digital spend is a combination of estimates by IHS for many types of VOD (including EST, TV-VoD, web-based VoD and sVoD services).

Other aspects of the industry

Other pockets of the industry have moved to digital processes, but I couldn't find data on exactly when digital became the norm. These include:

Screenwriting. Perhaps the first areas to move to digital processes were those which needed very simple technology, such as screenwriting. Film scripts have a very strict layout and it was a nightmare meeting the specifications manually. However, templates in existing software packages (like Microsoft Word) and bespoke packages (like Final Draft) took the headache out of formatting. Final Draft was launched in 1991 and a rival, Scriptor, won an Academy Award for technical achievement in 1994.

Production Management. I couldn't find a date as to when industry-standard budgeting and scheduling software Movie Magic was launched, but I did find an old manual dating back to 2002.

Makeup, costume and continuity. As a film can take months to shoot, many on-set roles involve matching their artistic work to previously-shot scenes. In the 20th century, polaroid film was used whereas now digital photos are far more cost effective.

Editing. The digitisation of the editing process was a gradual one. For most of the 20th century, edits were made by hand on a 35mm copy of the rushes, with the editor physically splicing and sticking shots together. Once the edit was finished (i.e. "locked"), a Neg Cutter would cut the original film negative to match the agreed edits. The emergence of tape formats allowed editors to do the initial rough editing (known as "offline editing") on tape copies of the rushes rather than film, making the process cheaper, quicker and more user-friendly. The first tape-based editing suite was launched in 1971, but it wasn't until the 1980s that they become widely used. In the 1990s, computers had increased in power and speed to the point where the offline process could be moved into the digital environment. Very low-resolution digital copies of the rushes were edited on a computer and then the edits were sent to the neg cutter to produce the final 35mm negative. The first Hollywood studio movie edited digitally (on an Avid system) was Lost in Yonkers in 1993 and the 1996 Best Editing Oscar went to Walter Murch for the digitally-cut The English Patient. Filmmaker IQ have a couple of great free lessons if you want to learn more on this topic.

Post-production. Other aspects of post-production were also digitised (such as colour grading, audio and visual effects), leading to the situation we have now whereby the film stays entirely in a digital environment for its entire post-production period, via a Digital Intermediate (aka a "DI"). So even if a movie is shot on celluloid film, it will be completed digitally. As previously discussed, the vast majority of films are also screened digitally but the few which project on film (such as movies by Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan) will be printed out to film once the DI is complete.

Notes

The data for today's piece came from the BFI, Raindance, IHS, Entertainment Retailers Association, The Official Charts Company and studies and databases I've built over the years. In some cases, charts add up to more than 100% due to the fact that some films use both digital and film formats.

Epilogue

This piece is a classic example of two aspects of this blog:

1. Firstly, it came from reader questions. If there's something you'd like me to look into about the film business then drop me a line.

2. Secondly, it will likely be improved, expanded (and corrected) by reader input, so please leave a comment below or send me a message directly if I've missed things off or got anything wrong.

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When and how the film business went digital

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Last week, I looked at six trends for how the film business is changing. It got a great response and I was heartened to see such interesting, lively debate about it. One of the topics raised by a few people was the move from analog to digital processes.

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BAFTA Winning filmmaker Mark Jenkin gives newcomers his advice - Crossing the Line Podcast