Digital Filmmaking Research Articles

STORYTELLING TO IGNITE LEARNING

Storytelling is as old as human communication. It is how communities kept and passed down their histories before the written word. For as long as there have been classrooms, teachers who wanted to connect with students have incorporated stories into their lessons. Today, teachers are navigating the complex realities of trying to keep students’ attention in the digital age. They are competing with the influence of social media and ubiquitous use of smartphones. In addition to these struggles, the effects of the worldwide pandemic and the realities of countries like Ukraine living through wartime on the state of global education, make it even more challenging to engage students. Teachers need additional tools to help students achieve critical outcomes and life skills. There is significant qualitative confirmation regarding the efficacy of storytelling in learning. The article presents research findings of educators in various fields who have studied the efficacy of storytelling as a pedagogy. This article also details observed outcomes and advantages of digital filmmaking as a type of storytelling that is an effective teaching framework. Digital storytelling is a dynamic and immersive tool that can help teachers foster lifelong learning skills in students. These include problem-solving, critical thinking, empathy and active listening, accountability, ethics, and integrity. Once learned, these skills and behaviors create the capacity to achieve further learning engagement, outcomes, such as leadership, community and innovation. Further, a consideration of how digital storytelling can help overcome recent challenges to the education system, such as COVID-19, is also included.

Nollywood and the challenge of digital archiving and preservation in the digital era

This paper discusses digital archiving and preservation as a challenge that Nollywood must grapple with in the digital era. The paper argues that, in other climes, filmmakers have since understood archiving and preservation as the last steps in the life of a movie; unlike in Nigeria, where many a filmmaker have no plan beyond marketing and distribution. The methodology adopted for the research is the qualitative method, with use of documents and visual media research instrument utilized. This study is anchored on the theory of functionalism to establish the paper’s strong position that, in this era of transition to digital filmmaking, it has become rather pertinent for Nigerian filmmakers to factor in the archiving and preservation of their films as the final phase of the production process, in view of the all-important role it plays in the life of their works. Findings reveal that once the current film is distributed, filmmakers tend to move on with planning for the next big project. Thus, they fail to spend quality time to grapple with the reality of where the product of their hard work will end up in the future. This study concludes that filmmakers should be sensitized to appreciate the gains of the future life of their films that archiving and preservation offer. The National Film, Video and Sound Archive (NFVSA) in Jos should be strengthened and well-positioned to harvest the offerings of Nigerian filmmakers for posterity through digital archiving and preservation is our recommendation.

'Enter the Memory': Interactivity, Authorship, and the Empowered Spectator in the Digital Audio-Visual Essays of Chris Marker

This article theorizes the cinematic essay as a fluid, self-reflexive form which addresses the spectator directly in order to engage them in an intellectual process of dialogical exchange. Because it encourages the active involvement of the viewer in the determination of essayistic meaning, the cinematic essay challenges traditional models of authorship. Asopposed to relaying information to a passive viewer from a position of authority and omniscience, the cinematic essayist offers tentative thoughts and ruminations which the spectator is called upon to critically think through and use as the foundation for their own essayistic reflections. The evolution of digital filmmaking technologies over the past few decades has opened new creative avenues through which cinematic essayists may construct interactive viewing situations andtreat the spectator as an empowered co-creator of artistic meaning. Thisarticle focuses on two of Chris Marker’s late-period worksto examine the relationship between dialogical exchange, interactive spectatorship,and the capabilities of the digital database: Immemory (1997)and Ouvroir (2012). In these works, Marker carries overhis career-long impulse towards dialogism to the realm of the digitized database, composingintricate, intermedial constellations of archival materials which theviewer may peruse in whatever order they please. Rejecting the fixed sequential ordering of causal film editing, as well as the strict classificatory systems of chronological archiving, Marker embraces new media to enable the spectator to traverse historical time through a dynamic, rhizomatic structure which fosters the forging of dynamic and individualized intertextual linkages. 

Southeast Asian Shapeshifters in the age of streaming: minor transnationalism, horror and reimagining MUBI in Malaysia

ABSTRACT In Malaysia, the re-emergence of local horror films at the start of the twenty-first century after nearly 30 years of absence coincided with the rise of a new wave of digital filmmaking. Since then, digital streaming platforms have proliferated as new circulatory routes for engaged, political and independent local films and audiovisual works, being less stringent than the Malaysian mainstream, state-controlled film and media landscape. Streaming platforms appear to be more suited for hosting horror, since this genre is often targeted by censorship due to excessive violence, explicit images and emphasis on evil. Notably, ‘Southeast Asian horror’ has emerged as one of the key curating and marketing strategies for the global arthouse streaming service MUBI in Southeast Asia. Through an analysis of global, regional and local streaming platforms with a particular focus on MUBI’s programming, alongside interviews with Malaysian film industry practitioners, this article explores how digital streaming services forge new circulatory routes for Southeast Asian cultural works and prompt new forms of ‘minor transnationalism.

Age of Visible Machines is Over

In this paper, I explore how the Harun Farocki’s late cinematic essays engage with a variety of computer-synthesised images to critically interrogate cultural anxieties regarding the waning of the index and the ostensible ‘loss’ of the real in the era of digital filmmaking. Applying close textual analysis to the projects Serious Games (2009-2010) and Parallel I-IV (2012-2014), I demonstrate that Farocki’s sustained engagement with ex nihilo images extends the filmmaker’s career-long interest in deconstructing the technical, ideological and economic aspects of ‘operational’ imagery to the specific context of advanced digital animation. In these cinematic essays, I argue, Farocki repurposes a range of digitally simulated images extracted from different sources, including footage extracted from popular video games, 3D architectural models, and military training programs, to investigate both the aesthetic qualities of computer animation and the role they play in wider social and institutional processes. Before I examine Farocki’s late work in depth, I first address the scholarly discourse surrounding the development of digital filmmaking, which treats the split between analogue and new media in terms of a straightforward conflict between the inherent trustworthiness of the former and the unreliability of the latter. According to such a viewpoint, the fact that analogue media is based on pro-filmic light values being physically imprinted onto a photochemical surface creates an immediate isomorphic link between the referent and its cinematic record, which means that analogue footage can be relied on to function as a ‘trace’ of the real. Having established this as background, I then examine the essayistic strategies mobilized by Farocki in his late digital works to challenge the ‘truth status’ of cinematic images and encourage the viewer to think carefully about the process of production which created the image and the social context in which it was circulated. Applying close textual analysis of the projects Serious Games and Parallel I-IV, I illustrate that Farocki’s late cinematic essays offer a sophisticated examination of the nature of realism, materiality and epistemological uncertainty in the digital era. It is my contention that, instead of communicating a single, objective ‘truth’ to the viewer, Farocki’s cinematic essays reflexively call into question the truth status of the images they place under scrutiny, therefore pointing to the ways in which images may be manipulated, falsified and inflected with bias. Farocki, therefore, mobilizes essayistic strategies to realize the epistemological potential of synthesized images which hold no direct indexical connection to pro-filmic events by subjecting them to a rigorous process of critical reframing. In exploring the function, formal design, and technological constitution of contemporary simulated images, Farocki expands and reconfigures classical notions of ‘truth value’ in nonfiction cinema based on the values on transparency, objectivity and photographic indexicality.

Digital 3D and the Hermeneutics of Modernity

Digital 3D and the Hermeneutics of Modernity Chang-Min Yu (bio) Nick Jones. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 304 pages. $140 hardback. $35 paperback. About twenty years ago, David Bordwell proposed the "modernity thesis" to characterize an emerging trend of scholarship that drew upon the works of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.1 In this "culturalist" school of thought—originating from New York and then prospering at Chicago—cinema originates from and, more importantly, reflects modernity.2 The first claim is widely accepted; the second is, to say the least, fraught and contested. While most scholars can agree that cinema is a modern technologized art, it is difficult to establish a causal relationship between what is onscreen—fast editing, intensified momentum, kaleidoscopic spectacle, you name it—and what circulates in culture. The reason is simple: if whatever case of modernity is that dominating, why are we not seeing its manifestation everywhere rather than in only a few selected tokens of its forestalled realization? Isomorphic reflection aside, it also seems strenuous to clarify modernity's history since the nineteenth century—its rise, fall, upsurge, and submergence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—with regard to any particular screen technique or characteristic at stake. Though largely left [End Page 386] as an unstated assumption, this issue of modernity hermeneutics is the daunting task Nick Jones sets for himself in Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: to convincingly articulate the modernity of 3D cinema and the relation to its cultural counterpart, "digital 3D."3 The book begins with a long history of 3D cinema and its attendant research (chapter 1) and subsequently moves into a broader historiographical framework stretching to include the Renaissance perspective (chapter 2). For Jones, 3D cinema and media have not supplanted art historian Erwin Panofsky's perspective as humanity's symbolic form, but they do "encapsulate many of the dominant and emerging logics that structure media, technology, and spatial knowledge at the present digital moment" (60). This is Jones's (weak) modernity thesis. For Jones, 3D cinema (re)surfaces because it "engender[s], document[s], and highlight[s] this situation" that is built upon the contemporary rendition of the "stereoscopic imaginary" (3). And I want to highlight "digital 3D" as a term because it is a modifier nominalized. It is untethered from "filmmaking" (1) and becomes a free-floating, abstract, expansive noun—like the so-called "stereoscopic imaginary"—a paragraph after. That supple abstraction is subsequently deployed to encapsulate all the chapter key words that Jones discusses: simulation, immersion, surveillance (chapters 3–5) and defamiliarization, distortion, and intimacy (chapters 6–8), the first three spatialized governance practices and the rest haptic subversive tactics. One is the smoothly engrossing commercial cinema that thematizes the datafied exploitation of the planet. The other reveals the operating logic of such calculations by either the slight instability inherent in stereoscopy, transitional failures in digital filmmaking, or auteurist interventions within the sphere of art cinema. The dichotomy is totalizing infrastructure versus localized resistance, abstraction and embodiment ontologically imbricated with each other in this calculated and yet tantalizing tactility. Thus understood, the term "digital 3D" has two purposes. The first is to draw a line—"the malleability of digital images detaches them from the connection to the past that seemed to define analog media" (53)—between analog and computerized 3D visuality. The distinction reaffirms the already-aged newness of stereoscopic images, whose history the book meticulously traces through existent scholarship. The second is to rearticulate 3D films, such as Avatar (2009) and Goodbye to Language (2014), in terms of culture at large. "Visual culture" in the book's subtitle is enlisted to spice up and make expansive the subject, which is to say that 3D is significant because it is cultural (and less cinematic). Hence the abstraction, [End Page 387] because the nominalized term enables a shift from "3D cinema" to "3D culture." This expansion produces a curious effect. The films discussed do not have to be 3D films as long as they furnish a holographic presentation in a technologically mediated environment. Similarly, Jones can point to virtual reality and other embodied visual praxis as part...

Vernacular Videos in the Participatory Culture of Web 2.0: The Contribution of Amateurs and Artists to the Development of Audio-visual Language

The revolution in communication technologies is changing language and this, in turn, will change human thinking. This statement can now be taken for granted. The fact that it is supported by many authors, including Marshal Mc Luhan (1964), Neil Postman (1992) and Lev Manovich (2002), is already evidence of it. The issue of information in the public sphere of Web 2.0 is controversial and much debated. The democratization of cyberspace brings with it the chance to develop a complex audiovisual grammar that anticipates video art and experimental films. The online environment features both to audiovisual experiments undertaken by amateur videographers and professional elites. In this place of extremes, there is room for developing both narrative and non-narrative expressions of self-reflexive audiovisual products. Whereas Lev Manovich (2002) states that the avant-garde becomes legitimised in the cut and paste era of digital filmmaking, which replaces the sequential narrative, this article sets out to determine the contribution of amateur videographers and artists to the development of the new audiovisual grammar of web 2.0. My case studies focus on the two main tendencies of home-made audiovisual products, both of them leading to the effectiveness of audiovisual communication. The video-confession replaces the visual narrative illustration with a form of orality that increases the audience’s imaginative participation. The DIY-videos, non-narrative metaphors in essay form, complement abstract comprehension. These new forms approach Astruc’s concept of caméra stylo, enhancing the audiovisual communication of the mass audience. Thus, the audience is able to comprehend a richer and more sophisticated cinematic language.

Vactor ontologies: framing acting within a motion capture context

ABSTRACT While an actor’s performance in a stage play may be seen as a continuous and unmediated form of acting, an actor’s performance in a film is constructed through shot framing, editing, effects work, and other cinematic apparatuses. With the advent of digital filmmaking, constructed performances have become more complex and nuanced, especially through the use of motion capture (MoCap). This research explores how we frame acting within a motion capture context – and specifically, how this affects our larger understanding of what is acting and how acting can be constructed. What does acting become when the product of acting starts as data and finishes as computer-generated images that preserve the source-actor’s ‘original’ performance to varying degrees? Is the source actor solely responsible for the MoCap performance we see on screen, or should other people within the production pipeline receive credit for their creative contributions to the finished acting result? What is at stake in differentiating film acting in MoCap from profilmic performances? Through consolidating and linking theoretical and practical considerations of screen acting in motion capture, this paper proposes a number of ways to conceive of acting and presence within a virtual acting context.

ГИПЕРРЕАЛИЗМ В ЦИФРОВОМ КИНЕМАТОГРАФЕ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ СЕРИАЛА-АНТОЛОГИИ «ЛЮБОВЬ, СМЕРТЬ И РОБОТЫ»)

The article is devoted to the aesthetic features of digital cinematography. Due to the widespread use of computer graphics in films, traditional methods of analyzing cinema are no longer enough. The fusion of graphic and photographic elements and the use of photorealistic graphics enable researchers to take a fresh look at the nature of film. Digital cinema, based on contemporary technologies, no longer builds on the photographic principles of filmmaking and presents a new form of realism and representation of reality on the screen. Objects created with the help of computer graphics can transform and go beyond the simulated real objects, while remaining photorealistic, unable to exist outside the framework of the screen and the particular film. Using classical film studies and philosophical works of Jean Baudrillard, Siegfried Krakauer, André Bazin, Christian Metz and the works of modern researchers of digital cinema such as Lev Manovich, Thomas Elsaesser and Malthe Hagener, the author analyzes the process of transition of digital objects from photorealistic to hyperrealistic ones, which today can be identified as real, while not existing in reality. This phenomenon is of undoubted interest for the academic study of new forms of realism in digital cinema. Based on the analysis of the Snow in the Desert episode from the Love, Death & Robots anthology series, the author traces the development of hyperrealism in digital cinema. Through state-of-the-art digital filmmaking technologies combining both graphic and photographic techniques—motion capture, digital cloning of actors, real-time fluid and environment modelling—we have a new kind of cinematography that is not limited to classical methods of filmmaking, but goes beyond cinema itself, merging with animation and video games. All these processes affect the film aesthetics and make it more malleable, free and less restricted by the classical understanding of motion picture.

Computer Interface as Film: Post-Media Aesthetics of Desktop Documentary

This paper explores a recently emerged audiovisual form called desktop documentary, an interdisciplinary computer-based variant of the essay film. As a post-media practice, no longer exclusively dependent on the film medium, desktop filmmaking represents a hybrid audiovisual genre entirely conducted in the digital environment by using and exploiting preexisting materials in new contexts while using the advantages of the Internet, widely used software and digital tools. Desktop documentary filmmaking corresponds to the widespread artistic practice of postproduction – a concept introduced by Nicolas Bourriaud signifying a new state of affairs when all texts of culture are already available (mostly as digital objects) and the artist intervenes on existing materials rather than produces artworks ex nihilo. Belonging to the tradition of essay film – a cinematic documentary and experimental mode in which moving images and off-screen verbal voice or textual captions establish complex relations – desktop video essays introduce new post-media aesthetics. Similar to the idea of using everyday materials in the artistic context, initially proposed with Duchamp’s ready-mades, which unprecedentedly effaced every notion of the style from their avant-garde aesthetics, desktop documentaries often minimize and abolish cinematic stylistic qualities. One of the most significant aspects of desktop documentaries is that the act of film viewing does not differ from common computer user experience: having replaced traditional film screen with the computer interface, the interactive process of computational multitasking and navigation, performed on various digital data and files, becomes the very content of the film. After the historical overview of the phenomenon and general introduction into the post-media theory, selected works of representative desktop documentarists such as Kevin B. Lee and Louis Henderson are analyzed in their deconstructive approach to traditional and digital filmmaking – subversive both formally and politically. Article received: May 28, 2019; Article accepted: July 6, 2019; Published online: October 15, 2019; Original scholarly paper

The Pioneers Get Shot: Music Video, Independent Production and Cultural Hierarchy in Britain

This article identifies and summarises the main findings of the AHRC research project ‘Fifty Years of British Music Video, 1966–2016’. It contextualises the history of music video as a film practice within an unspoken cultural hierarchy of screen arts widely shared in universities, policy circles and the British Film Institute. The article documents the main stages in the development of the music video industry and highlights the extent to which the pioneers served as early adopters of new technologies in videotape, telecine and digital film-making. The ACTT consistently lobbied against music video producers, as did the Musicians’ Union, and consequently music video producers emerged from the 1980s with virtually no protection of their rights. The ACTT's issue was new video technology which it opposed. It also opposed offline editing on video tape because it would lead to redundancies of film editors and potentially required fewer post-production crew. The MU's issue was royalty payments to session musicians and lip synch. The music video industry has functioned as a crucial R&D sector and incubator for new talent and new technologies in the British film and television industries as a whole, without experiencing any of the financial rewards, cultural status or copyright protections of the more esteemed ‘screen arts’.

Making connections: a reflection on narrative group work with Latinx youth

ABSTRACT This narrative essay reflects on group work processes with Latinx youth integrating collective narrative therapy practices with digital filmmaking in a workshop format. Focusing on lessons learned, the essay describes the workshop process and outcomes, centering the voices of workshop participants through direct quotes from field notes and audio recordings. The essay considers the ways in which narrative practices in group work can be used to contribute to personal and societal transformation.

William Brown, Non-Cinema: Global Digital Film-making and the Multitude

William Brown, Non-Cinema: Global Digital Film-making and the Multitude

Archaeologies of post-socialist temporalities: Documentary experiments and the rhetoric of ruin gazing

Focusing on the independent documentary movement that is also a movement of digital filmmaking in China, this essay examines documentary’s mediation of post-socialist conceptions of time through digital filmmaking aesthetics, including ruin gazing, forwarding and reversing, and accelerating and decelerating film speed. In a comparative study of experimental documentaries on post-socialist temporalities in Eastern Europe and China—including the work of Chantal Akerman, Cong Feng, and Huang Weikai—the essay unravels documentary’s representation of time that illustrates the “post” as a locus of desires and anxieties, backward and forward glances that create heterogeneous relationships—with their own economy of stasis, velocity, and speed—in relation to the homogeneous and teleological time of Capital.

A Technical Study of LUT for Creative Color Representation in the Digital Filmmaking

A Technical Study of LUT for Creative Color Representation in the Digital Filmmaking

Of Digital Selves and Digital Sovereignty: Of the North

At its Canadian premier, Dominic Gagnon's Of the North (2015) launched a passionate debate regarding the ethics of image appropriation and digital filmmaking about Indigenous communities. Of the North follows Gagnon's “natively” digital method, which involves the sampling and montage of public domain images and sounds posted by internauts with the stated intent of documenting how people represent themselves online. In a controversy that crystallized around questions of “digital sovereignty,” Inuit critics decried the recontextualization of personal video posts by a film, they argued, that did not promote an Inuit view of Inuit experience. This article addresses the ways in which Gagnon's digital method collapsed cultural contexts, bringing to light divergent cultural and generational expectations regarding digital presence and sovereignty. An analysis of the film's heated reception and new digital works by young Indigenous filmmakers suggests an intercultural ethics for visual ethnographies.

Memory Resurrected in HD: Collective Digital Video Filmmaking as Production of Counterhistory in the Folk Memory Project

This article examines the Folk Memory Project, a collective documentary initiative in China that organized young filmmakers to return to their home villages to interview elders and unearth silenced memories of the devastating Chinese Great Famine of 1959–61. Focusing on two films produced as part of this project, Self-Portrait with Three Women (dir. Zhang Mengqi, China, 2010) and Children's Village (dir. Zou Xueping, China, 2012), the article argues that the project produces a counterhistory through collective film production in a digital format. These films foreground the filmmaking process and the filming subjects, demonstrating self-reflexive performativity more than transparent authenticity. It is such performativity that mediates between the past and the present, between the individual and the collective. As a participatory performance of filmmaking, the Folk Memory Project demonstrates the profound impact of digital production on the filming subjects as well as its sociopolitical implications. It asks for a paradigm shift in our theoretical understanding of digital cinema, moving from a focus on the indexicality of the image to a consideration of the plurality of knowledge in media, from the subjectivity of spectators to the subjectivity of filmmakers.

Slightly Independent and Illegal: Yaima Pardo’s films OFF_LINE and SWITCH ON at the Crossroads of Literacy, Inclusion and Digital Filmmaking in Contemporary Cuban Cinema

Cuban filmmaker Yaima Pardo creates a participatory digital literacy campaign in her documentary OFF_LINE (2013) and documentary series SWITCH ON (2013-present). Through her work she establishes a multi-directional dialogue on digital literacy. Beyond this call for digital literacy, Pardo herself is part of a contemporary generation of Cuban filmmakers, nuevos realizadores that depend on digital technology to make, distribute and exhibit their works despite their illegal status as the Cuban state does not recognize their independent production companies. Challengingover fivedecades of control, Pardo and her peers are part of a larger national fight to redefine Cuban film.

Aesthetics of queer becoming: Comrade Yue and Chinese community-based documentaries online

ABSTRACT While many studies explore how digital technology influenced the production and consumption of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) media in the Euro-American context, few have focused on LGBT media in China despite its significant growth. Intersecting LGBT media studies with studies on Chinese communication technologies, this paper looks at videos made in community-based documentary workshops, including the Queer University (kuer daxue) Digital Filmmaking Training Camp. Many of the videos are articulations and reinventions of multiple selves enacted through the construction of image and sound. Against the backdrop of neoliberalized governance of selfhood, this new wave of community-based queer documentaries, exemplified by Comrade Yue (2013), embodies the “aesthetics of queer becoming.” Specifically, the expressive personal histories in these videos contest the “authentic” homosexual subjects that function as objects of knowledge in mainstream media. The bodily corporality on screen and the intimacy of the video apparatus operate as an interrogation of identity that intervenes in the ongoing discursive debate between the biological determinist and socially constructed views on homosexuality. Furthermore, video-making itself becomes an act of coming out through confessional or performative modes of sound–image relationships. Video is a vital medium to work through and within the process of identification and community formation. The medium of the video, with its capacity for dissemination online, functions as a unique format that gives rise to a new set of queer aesthetics and politics through first-person audio-visual constructions.

Mobilizing Knowledge via Documentary Filmmaking — Is the Academy Ready?

The predominant form of research dissemination resides in the scholar’s domain, namely academic conferences and peer-reviewed journals. This paper describes how two colleagues and researchers integrated documentary filmmaking with research methods in their respective scholarly work, supporting the case for documentary film as an alternative form of scholarly work and knowledge mobilization outside the walls of the university. The authors add to the ongoing conversation for a more dynamic use of digital video-recording that moves beyond simple data collection and encourage researchers to tap into multimodal forms of expression, specifically digital filmmaking.