• Home
  • People
  • Projects
  • News
  • Contact
  • Blogs

BLOGETTE #2 …

2/23/2012

1 Comment

 
MEDIA-WHEEL, savvy Slanted Wheel Guide-to-Everything, gives readers a SLANT on the new digital world of film and TV photography.
                            ____________________________

Many years ago, Mel Brooks appeared on the Johnny Carson show.  After the usual riffs and quips, Johnny asked Mel a penetrating question.

“Mel, what do you find to be the hardest thing about making a movie?”

Without hesitation, Mel replied, “Punching in all those little holes along the edges of the film.”  Raucous laughter from the live studio audience ensued.

Wouldn’t happen now.  These days it would most likely be incomprehension coming from audience members.  “Little holes?  Huh?” 

The fact is that Mel’s once-witty riposte has been rendered irrelevant, meaningless.  The explanation is clear, if a touch harsh.

FILM IS OVER!   FINISHED!  GONE FOREVER!  DEAD!  AS OUTMODED AS MANUAL TYPEWRITTERS!

The facts are these:   Panavision, AARI and Aaton have all quietly ceased production of film cameras.   Kodak and Fujifilm are still making film (presumably with the little holes along the sides that Mel referred to back in the day), but Kodak is nearing bankruptcy and Fujifilm isn’t far behind.  And what use is a film camera without the film to load into it?

So long celluloid.  Hello digital.

But is this a good thing? An improvement? Does anyone care?  Are we sad about it … at all?

“Well, I do miss the texture of film,” says David Frazee, director of the two-hour Borealis pilot (for SPACE and CTV) currently in post-production.  “But the time has come when using film is just not necessary anymore.”

History has demonstrated that although new technology means certain gains it brings with it certain losses as well. The art of letter writing, for example.  Are we to look forward to the collected emails or TWEETS (god forbid!) of our era’s influential thinkers? Never mind.  Mr. Frazee sees mostly the positives of digital filming.

“Shooting digital is a lot faster.  It’s not like film stock.  You don’t have to change loads, which is an advantage,” says the distinguished director who in addition to Borealis has directed multiple episodes of Flashpoint and Endgame, among others.  Frazee reports that the newest product from AARI, the “Alexa,” was used by Director of Photography Mathias Herndl to shoot Borealis.  “The camera is smaller and lighter, so easier to handle.  Also extremely sensitive so you can use less light.” Nor do you need to transfer, or make film prints (which can cost as much as $2000 each) Frazee adds.

So, faithful readers, my blog-foray into the world of technology concludes here, because above is the sum total of what I actually know about it.  However, education is ongoing.  If you have info, opinions, ideas … please feel free to share.  Drop us a line … digitally.

MEDIA-WHEEL  
Picture
Director, David Frazee, on the set of Borealis.

1 Comment
Daniel
5/10/2013 02:46:12 am

There are consequences to the switch from analog to digital more fundamental in meaning, beyond any artistic, financial, or logistical concerns. Mainly, the longevity of the material. We are, in principle, going from recording images of the world, to storing abstract measurements about it. Unlike the projection of film, showing a digital video is no longer making visible a previously recorded image, but a best-effort reconstruction of a new image from digital measurements.

The most direct influence is on what happens when we want to watch that material in the future. Beyond the short term degradation (a degraded film looks and sounds worse, a degraded digital video file is lost), what about the long-term? Anything that is recorded only digitally can, for all intents and purposes, be already considered as lost for future generations. Compare it to vinyl records and CDs. We can still listen to music recorded on some 120 year old wax cylinders. Someone who finds a vinyl record in 200 years will figure out a way to listen to what is recorded on it, because it is a direct image of the sound. Someone who finds a compact disc, perhaps not even 100 years from now, will probably be at a loss, because the data does not depict the sound, it is an encoded storage of abstract measurements about it. We can reconstruct unknown digital formats today because we can assume that people don't always reinvent the wheel, so to say. We know how it is customary to record digitally. But without this prior knowledge, the 1s and 0s on a music CD or video DVD are completely nonsensical. There is no way for anyone to reconstruct what's on them. There's a reason why those "messages for aliens" that were sent into outer space were sent on an analog, not a digital, record.

By increasingly abolishing analog media formats and record keeping, we're entering an age in which all our history and culture is prone to being lost within just a few decades. This is a huge issue from a historian's perspective. Remember the massive loss of silent films due to nitrate film? The losses we will see because of the "digital age" will make that seem like nothing at all. There are no prints of digital film, and it is not just film being stored in that same manner. We're looking at the almost predetermined loss of a majority of the art and knowledge produced in these times.

I would not be too surprised if maybe 50 years from now, what we so euphorically call the "information age" today will be seen as a regular "information dark age"—the times in which humanity foolishly thought that they no longer needed to store information physically.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    January 2013
    February 2012
    October 2011

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Slanted Wheel Entertainment TM 2011