Class Eleven: Rethinking Cinema

Homework updates

Guest updates

Friday Guest

WikiScanner: My Summer of Dilettante Data-mining or
Making a corporation-sized cannon and
letting the Internet decide where to point it

Virgil Griffith, California Institute of Technology

Friday, November 16, 2 p.m
Calit2 Building, Room 3008

Check out the Colbert Report video on his website for more

Lawrence Lessig on read-write culture vs. read-only culture

Language of New Media (website)

Manovich Chapter Three "The Operations"

cut, copy, paste, search, composite, transform, filter (obvious categories - 118)

selecting, compositing, and teleaction (Manovich's categories - 118)

sampling and morphing (the work of others - 118)

The logic of selection - menus, filters, plug-ins - databases of stock material

Predefined menus and the logic of identity (128)

Dove Evolution (parodies and more here, here, here, here, here, here, and here . . . and this goes on and on to Photoshop transformations of elderly ladies and women in mugshots)

Postmodernism and Photoshop (129)

Compositing: Simulation of space, camera movement, and objects (137)

Montage: lyrics and video from Team America

Single-shot films like Russian Ark

Lack of montage in games (desire to correlate different senses)

And pushing montage to limit (Dove Onslaught)

Or letting editing software make the decisions in Amateur

The idea of telepresence - illusion and action (164)

vividness and interactivity matrix

Vision no longer opposed to touch (175)

Possibilities for aggression (175)

Animator vs. Animation

Manovich Chapter Four "The Illusions"

Synthetic realism seeks to attain two goals: "the simulation of the codes of traditional cinematography and the simulation of the perceptual properties of real life objects and environments." (391-392)

The idea of the "uncanny valley"

Mimesis and illusionism - the story of Zeuxis (195) - and its prehistory in Plato's Republic

"Pre-assembled standardized objects, characters, and behaviors readily provided by software" (197)

Massive games and cinematic tools Carleton Big Ad

Special effects for Hollywood films being like medieval cathedrals (201)

SIGGRAPH as the professional society for computer animators

A representation of a different reality (202)

Analogy to Socialist Realism (203)

But new media "keep reminding us of their artificiality, incompleteness, and constructedness." (205)

Oscillation between illusionism and deconstruction (208)

Military simulators (209-210)

Manovich Chapter Six "What is Cinema?"

From cinema to new media and new media to cinema (287)

Computer images are 1) discrete, 2) modular 3) constituted by two layers of surface appearance and underlying code, 4) compressed, 5) transformable into interfaces, 6) contradictory when representational and tool-oriented interface functions conflict, 7) defined by depth and surface, 8) functions as image-instrument as well as image-interface, 9) not a self-enclosed entity because of hyperlinking, 10) capable of variability and automation, and 11) database-accessible. (289-291)

How images were once generated and animated manually

How is cinema changed (300-301)

1. Film-like scenes can be generated on the computer (lens glare in games)

2. Different kinds of images are all the same digitally

3. Footage becomes raw material for further compositing

4. Editing and Special Effects are Mixed (see your YouTube experience)

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

24 parody materials