User:Emily/Self-Evaluation trimester IV

Notes

Here is the page for gathering research materials focusing on moving image studies. The reading and notes will help me to understand the history and changes of the mechanism of moving image production. Through examining those mechanisms, I want to address my strategies to build new connections among moving images and explore alternatives with human interfering or maybe body involvement.

There are a lot of terms within or related to moving image, such as Cinema, Animation, Video Art, Media Art etc. What's more there are even more genres under them, like music video, video game, avant-garde film to name just a few. I believe there are overlay within those terms and in oder to make the study clear, I take the term moving image, which I emphasised on the mechanism of producing movement or illusion of the dynamic. Under such huge range, I think I should also pick several main subjects to look at. Briefly starting with pro-cinematic devices (Phenakistiscope1832, Thaumatrop, Zootrope1833, Pranxinoscope), then cinema because it has a systematic language, cinematic language, to start with. Then gradually get to digital cinema which is actually be considered as a particular case of animation by Lev Manovich, and last but not least several cases in computer-based moving image.

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Cinema is not equivalent to storytelling and 'what used to be cinema's defining characteristics have become just the default options, with many other available.'

'As testified by its original names(kinetoscope, cinematograph, moving pictures), cinema was understood, from its birth, as the art of motion.' At its origin, it requited manual action to create movement. (twirling the strings of the Thaumatrope, rotating the Zootrope's cylinder, turning the Viviscope's handle.) 'The movement itself was limited in range and affected only a clearly defined figure rather than the whole image' The movement were based on loops, sequence of images which can be played repeatedly. Although cinematic machines had been built to increase the duration of loop, in order to adopt a much longer narrative form, cutting short seems foredoomed to be developed.

'Once the cinema was stabilised as a technology, it cut all references to its origins in artifice...all of this was delegated to cinema's bastard relative, its supplement, its shadow --animation. Twentieth century animation became a depository for nineteenth century moving image techniques left behind by cinema.' 'In contrast, cinema works hard to erase any traces of its own production process.' 'It pretends to be a simple recording of an already existing reality --both to a viewer and to itself. Cinema'a public image stressed the aura of reality "captured" on film, thus implying that cinema was about photographing what existed before the camera, rather than "never-was" of special effects.'

What is Digital Cinema 1. 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 2. once live action footage is digitised (or directly recorded in a digital format), it loses its privileged indexical relationship to pro-filmic reality. 3. if live action footage was left intact in traditional filmmaking, now it functions as raw material for further compositing, animating and morphing. 4. previously editing and special effects were strictly separate activities Digital cinema is a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its man elements. Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular case of animation in the end. In principle given enough time and money, one can create what will be the ultimate digital film: 90mins, i.e., 129600 frames completely painted by hand from scratch, but indistinguishable in appearance from live photography. In commercial cinema, the use of computer is always carefully hidden. with examples from Manovich, it can be perceived the shift from re-arranging reality to re-arranging its images.

To conclude, for me, the circular transformation from animation to cinema back to animation again, the challenge which digital media poses to cinema extends far beyond the issue of narrative, but the very essential making of moving image, the language and syntax.