Digital Cinema

Case Study: Voices of Iraq (2004)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2a6gV_JsWo
Discussion questions:
a) What is the ‘filmmakers’ role in the film

create a platform for the Iraqi to speak out and show the situation of Iraq. the filmmaker is like an observer and recorder, but at the same time, he is also one of the Iraqis. It is like true man show. for me, it seems it is much more convincing than other filmmakers who are not the local people.

b) What are the key enabling technologies that allow this to be produced?
the knowledge of operating the video, the angle of the camera and also the skill of editing.

c) Whose reality is being shown?
though it seems it is representing the reality of Iraqi, the eyes of the filmmaker matters more. because i do think the filmmaker has selected what to capture and the conversation which relates to the theme. therefore, i would suggest that this movie is capturing the reality regarded by the filmmaker.

Mission to Earth
1) What is new or different about this example of digital cinema when compared with a) traditional ways of telling a story b) and constructing a film?
Mission to Earth is a movie made by Lev Manovich. it belongs to soft cinema. there are 4 ideas that soft cinema explores:
the first idea is algorithmic editing of media materials. it uses a series of rules defined by the authors so that the software controls the screen layout and the number of windows as well as their content. The authors have the total power to choose to exercise minimal control leaving most choices to the software; also, they can decide what the viewer will see in a particular moment in time. becasuse the editing process is performed in real time by the program, the movies can run infinitely without repeating the same edits.

the second idea is Macro-cinema. In Soft Cinema, the computer program breaks the screen into a number of square regions of diffeirent dimensions and show at the same time on screen. During the playback, different clips are assigned to diffirent regions. In this way, the software determines temporal and spatial distribution of a work.

the third idea is Multimedia cinema. video is used as only one type of representation among others including 2D animation, motion graphic etc. rather than simply using different types of representation for a simple visual effect, Soft Cinema investigates whether it is possible for fictional narration to use them.

the forth idea is the Database Cinema. the elements of the movie is based on a large database to construct many different narrative films and even the different versions of the same film.

these ideas are totally different from the traditional way of story telling and film construction.

reference: http://www.softcinema.net/form.htm
2) What other art (film, digital art, painting etc) does this film remind you of?
this reminds me the collage animation. it also collects the data (the fragmented pic) first and than put them together to form a work. soft cinema and collage animation requires a large database.