Digital Filmmaking Research Articles

The Slum Film Festival in Nairobi: Exploring cinematic representation from the urban margins

Abstract Since the introduction of digital film-making in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, there has been an unprecedented growth of audio-visual production by individuals within these communities despite the fact that venues for local exhibition were virtually non-existent. In 2011, a specific film event called the Slum Film Festival (SFF) was created to both recognize these unique, self-mediated representations from the slums and to screen these films for their own internal audiences. In this article, we will question how mainstream media relegates slum communities to the margins of formal urban life by documenting some of the aspects that led to the creation of this particular film festival and commenting on some of its selected films. By using qualitative information from literature review, first-hand professional experience of the authors in Nairobi and interviews with SFF participants, we will analyse external and internal perceptions of the slums through its films, which compose a ‘slum filmography’ resulting in a more diverse understanding of Kenya’s main urban slums and more complex definitions of identity.

Toward a spatiotemporal consciousness in media studies: locational aesthetics and digital filmmaking in China's Special Zones

The abstraction of space in ‘new’ media theory, together with the preoccupation with space in Asian studies, demands a rethinking of the time–space relationship in terms of Asia and digital media. This essay explores how spatiotemporal consciousness is articulated in the locational aesthetics of contemporary Chinese digital media, specifically the thematic interest in examining everyday space; the self-reflexive and experimental aesthetic that locates the media practitioner in the social space; and the creation of the independent artistic space. To accomplish this, this paper scrutinizes the practices of two art/film groups, Big Tail Elephants and u-thèque, in particular a digital documentary project Sanyuanli, for a broader consideration of their narrative experimentations, locational styles, site-specific practices, and negotiations with the spatiotemporality of the so-called Special Economic Zones. Specifically, this paper looks at how the locational aesthetics employed in digital filmmaking confirm and contest spatiotemporal constructions the Special Zones that reinforce the pre-existing urban-rural divide, naturalize the biopolitical management of the migrant workers, and contribute to a new developmental narrative of the state that endorses linear and progressive temporality.

Community filmmaking as research: (re)considering knowledge production through the camera's lens

In southern Chile, Mapuche Indigenous communities are using video and digital filmmaking to collectively reflect on and communicate knowledge. This article shares their experience, arguing that with the increasing accessibility of information and communication technologies, we should be rethinking and broadening the acceptable ways to generate and convey knowledge about development. Acknowledging the diverse ways of knowing and communicating knowledge, this article suggests that video can be a powerful tool for self-representative knowledge-sharing by Indigenous communities. Only by expanding our debates beyond written media can we engage equitably with a plurality of knowledge-holders to resolve development challenges.

Children’s emotions and multimodal appraisal of places: Walking with the camera

This sensory ethnography explores the affordances and constraints of multimodal design to represent emotions and appraisal associated with experiencing local places. Digital video production, walking with the camera, and the use of a think-aloud protocol to reflect on the videos, provided an opportunity for the primary school children to represent their emotions and appraisal of places multimodally. Applying a typology from Martin and White's (2005) framework for the Language of Evaluation, children's multimodal emotional responses to places in this study tended toward happiness, security, and satisfaction. The findings demonstrate an explicit connection between children's emotions in response to local places through video, while highlighting the potential for teachers to use digital filmmaking to allow children to reflect actively on their placed experiences and represent their emotional reactions to places through multiple modes.

Effectiveness of Digital Storytelling on Cultural Awareness

Digital storytelling refers to a wide variety of concepts from interactive digital narratives to computer game narratives, from web-based dramas to digital filmmaking tools. The digital storytelling approach provides students with an environment in which they can actively use technology as participatory designers in the process of creating messages regarding their thoughts. This research aims to reveal the effectiveness of digital storytelling practice to increase the motivation in the instructional environment, to raise awareness through teaching elementary school students some cultural values and to affect effective use of technology in elementary schools. The participants of the study were chosen among the elementary school students in the city of Eskisehir. In the study, the criterion for determining the participants was taking the course of “Digital Storytelling” found in the Education Program for Talented Students (EPTS). At the end of the digital storytelling process, many of the students expressed that being active participant in the design process and using their own products were exciting and pleasing and encourage them to interest on cultural themes through awareness.

From Film Archives to Digital Filmmaking: Exploring War Memories in American Documentaries

The memory of American wars has been largely influenced by iconic visuals, used either to promote patriotic cohesion behind the rationale for war or to question the motivations behind the United States military involvement abroad. War documentaries, while serving conflicting perspectives in times of war, participate in the construction of sites of memory while retrospectively engaging with war issues. Incorporating archive footage as a source of historical knowledge, these nonfiction films pr...

Digital Lives: Refiguring the recent and distant pasts in new biographical forms

In the past decade digital media have progressively become the major forms of memorialising figures and events of the past. Memory itself, in the manner by which it is encoded, stored and accessed, has developed into an increasingly digitised medium due to advancing technologies and the proliferation of digital archiving. This article considers the impact of digital filmmaking and digital media forms on contemporary biographical narratives, as well as how digital filmmaking practices have been applied to the biographical film for unique aesthetic, thematic and narrative purposes. The examination of divergent applications of digital techniques in the representation of both recent and distant pasts will allow for greater insight into the modern biographical subject. I focus on The Social Network (2010) in order to investigate the framing of a biographical subject within events of the recent past. I consider the manner in which the film exploits its pastness for unique aesthetic and narrative purposes, highlighting particularities of the generational zeitgeist through its non-linear narrative structure and its employment of what I describe as an “internet aesthetic” that serves to memorialise a previous technological era. This approach examines the film’s emphasis on visual composition and engagement with technology in its representation of its biographical subject. In this manner, the digital can be viewed as adding further forms of stylistic expression as well as having the potential to involve viewers more directly with figures and events of the past. This article also examines how digital representational strategies allow for a more temporally-specific engagement, reflecting the development of new ways in which audiences access and interact with history through biographical narratives. Viewing The Social Network alongside films such as Che (2008), Public Enemies (2009) and 127 Hours (2010) I illustrate how contemporary biopics construct different ways of experiencing their historical figures, with digital aesthetics lending qualities of presentness and propinquity to past events. Digital is frequently employed to enhance the immediacy of the past in order to align the spectator more closely with the experiences of a film’s subject(s), and the issues raised by these representational strategies need to be considered when looking to the future of the biographical film.

Putting Words On Paper: A Technoautobiography

This project was originally created for a class called Multimedia Authoring, which is sort of a whirlwind tour through graphic design, web design, and digital filmmaking from both a practical and theoretical perspective. Although the class as a whole is inherently very optimistic about new technologies, because it teaches students how to understand the exciting rhetorical possibilities afforded by them, I wanted to examine a specific case where I had found technological progress to be problematic. This piece explores my personal history with technologies that enable writing.

Analog Circuit Palettes, Cathode Ray Canvases: Digital's Analog, Experimental Past

This paper contends that the development of digital filmmaking can, in part, be traced back to the efforts of experimental filmmakers seeking to make abstractions in time. In other words, the advent of computer-generated and computer-assisted filmmaking occurred via analog means, beginning in the early 1950s, in the oscilloscope films of Mary Ellen Bute. These ideas were expanded and refined by John Whitney in his work on the title sequence for Hitchcock's Vertigo . Whitney continued to develop analog computer technologies to make wonderfully rigorous and colorful non-objective films, as did the first generation of video artists, who developed artisanal analog devices to create new ways of synthesizing imagery.

Drop by Drop: Greenaway's Shakespearean Transformations

This article focuses on the literal and metaphorical tempests that transform The Tempest into Peter Greenaway's 1991 film Prospero's Books . Drawing on Shakespeare's own recurring use of the sea as an element of annihilation and rebirth, the essay first examines Greenaway's use of water imagery in the opening shipwreck of his film. Joining the unconventional bath-bound storm is a maelstrom of literary, cinematic and classically artistic imagery, centred on Prospero's twenty-four titular books. Greenaway's deliberate emphasis on 'the text as text' combines with the film's explosion of images to create a hypertext of sorts: viewers are plunged into an almost infinite stream of associations and combinations, which they are free to surf. This tempest-tossed assortment of material - from seventeenth-century playtext, through classical art and baroque excess, to the most advanced digital filmmaking technology on offer in 1991 - produces a film conscious of its place on the threshold of change. Locating itself at the end of a process of technological advancement begun in early modernity, the film endlessly recycles, manipulates and creates, subjecting its own constitutive elements to their own sea-change, into something rich and strange.

Vasomotor Effect after Acute Intoxication with Bupivacaine and Levobupivacaine in Rats Via Intraperitoneal Route Analyzed via Digital Infrared Imaging

The study of the vasomotor effect of local anesthetics (LA) is of paramount importance for the analysis of the occurrence of cardiotoxic and neurotoxic effects, and drug interactions. In order to find a safer drug than racemic bupivacaine, this study aimed to analyze digital infrared imaging of acute vasomotor effect of bupivacaine and levobupivacaine in rats intraperitoneally. We used 30 male Wistar rats distributed into three groups (n=10) and subjected to an intraperitoneal injection of LA. In Group C (control) 1 mL 0.9% saline was injected intraperitoneally. In Group B (bupivacaine), intraperitoneal injection of 0.5% of racemic bupivacaine (S50-R50), dose of 20 mg.kg⁻¹ of body weight. In Group L (levobupivacaine), intraperitoneal injection of levobupivacaine 0.5% enantiomeric excess (S75-R25) in dose of 20 mg.kg⁻¹ of body weight. The procedure was thermographicly continuously filmed from the time of pre-injection until 30 minutes after injection. The results of the recordings were analyzed in graphical form, verifying the maximum temperature of each rat and the average temperature of the system that housed the animal. The results of graphic analysis showed no difference between Group L and Group C, and the average temperature remained stable throughout the experiment in both groups. In Group B, there was a phenomenon of temperature increase after intraperitoneal injection of bupivacaine. The results demonstrated that the vasomotor effect of the acute toxicity of levobupivacaine was similar to Group C with saline, through macroscopic studies by infrared digital filmmaking, and that there were vasomotor changes (vasoconstriction), with bupivacaine intoxication in relation to both Group C and Group L.

디지털 영화제작을 위한 레드 원 카메라의 활용성 연구

본 논문은 새롭게 개발된 레드 원(RED ONE)카메라의 장단점들을 분석하고 분석된 자료를 기존 디지털 카메라와 비교 했다. 영화제작시스템이 디지털영화제작시스템으로 전환하면서 기존 필름카메라 회사인 Arriflex도 디지털 카메라인 Arri D21을 개발했고 고화질 디지털 카메라의 대명사인 Sony도 CineAlta F35를 통해 디지털 영화제작의 선도적인 역할을 수행하고 있다. 이러한 디지털 영화제작의 기술적 진보속에서 레드 원 카메라의 등장은 필름메이커들에게 새로운 가능성을 열어주고 있다. Arri 와 Sony 같이 긴 역사적 배경을 가진 회사와는 다르게 개발 시작부터 현재까지 디지털 영화제작 스테프들의 요구를 최대한 반영하여 디지털 카메라를 발전시킨다는 점이 레드 원만의 독특한 장점 중에 하나일 것이다. 사용자를 배려한 디지털카메라의 개발은 영화제작 환경에 파급효과를 가져왔으며 상업용 디지털영화제작을 주도하게 된 중요한 요인이 되었다. This paper is an analysis of the newly invented RED ONE camera and its various advantages, and also a comparison of the results with already existing digital cameras. As film production systems have been converting to digital systems, Arri Camera, one of the existing film camera companies, has invented and developed the Arri D21.Sony, the leader of the high definition digital camera industry, is also securing its role as the leader of digital filmmaking by introducing the CineAlta F-900 series. With these advances in digital filmmaking, the advent of the RED ONE camera opens doors to new possibilities to digital filmmakers. The development of digital cameras with thoughtful consideration for its users has Influenced the filmmaking environment immensely and has become the reason why it is playing a major role in digital filmmaking.

The mouse machine: Disney and technology

Throughout Disney's phenomenally successful run in the entertainment industry, the company has negotiated the use of cutting-edge film and media technologies that, J. P. Telotte argues, have proven fundamental to the company's identity. Disney's technological developments include the use of stereophonic surround sound for Fantasia, experimentation with wide-screen technology, inaugural adoption of three-strip Technicolor film, and early efforts at fostering depth in the animated image. Telotte also chronicles Disney's partnership with television, development of the theme park, and depiction of technology in science fiction narratives. An in-depth discussion of Disney's shift into digital filmmaking with its Pixar partnership and an emphasis on digital special effects in live-action films, such as the Pirates of the Caribbean series, also highlight the studio's historical investment in technology. By exploring the technological context for Disney creations throughout its history, The Mouse Machine illuminates Disney's extraordinary growth into one of the largest and most influential media and entertainment companies in the world. Hardback is unjacketed.

What is Diasporic Chinese cinema in Southeast Asia?

This paper problematizes the category of ‘Chinese cinema’ to ask if it adequately describes films made by independent Southeast Asian film-makers of Chinese ancestry which, for political and socio-historical reasons, may not be in Chinese language. It argues that diasporic Chinese film-makers’ works need to be repositioned within a discussion of the recent revival of film industries and the rise of digital technology and independent film-making in the region, in order to understand the tensions between cosmopolitan, nationalist or cultural ways of identification. Lastly, while digital technology has undoubtedly democratized film-making and contributed much to broadening the public sphere, most indie film-makers regard digital as a cheaper alternative to film and not as a new media format with its own aesthetic qualities worth exploring.

E = MC 2 + 1

This article presents a unique course for students, the course took place at the Tampere University of Technology (TUT) in the NAMU --- New AMbient MUltimedia research group. The basic idea was to create a five-minute production involving all the new technology available to the modern film-maker. We want to prove that even a non-experienced team of film-makers are capable of creating a short HD film with (almost) commonly available equipment. A full high-definition (HD) digital workflow was undertaken --- from scene to screen. In each production step, new technologies and approaches were tested to explore the world of digital film-making. In pre-production the movie-script was written collaboratively with Wiki tools. The participants' experience was evaluated, and the results are presented in this article. In production we focused on HD methods to create content and applied the Material eXchange Format (MXF) to handle metadata in production; the final movie was distributed via typical television channels, such as DVB-T, IP-TV, and DVB-H. The experimental results are presented in this article as well. In this article we present our experience in terms of technology, introduce a learning-by-doing concept during course development, and give a complete analysis of a full digital HD workflow.

Familiarity, Proficiency and the Authorial Endeavour in Digital Filmmaking

Familiarity, Proficiency and the Authorial Endeavour in Digital Filmmaking

Bridging Fiction and Documentary in Godard's Notre Musique

This paper is a close analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film, Notre Musique. Its primary focus is the implications of Godard’s blending of documentary footage with staged footage. Among the examples of documentary and narrative blurring, Godard stages an interview with an internationally known poet, Mahmoud Darwish, and though the pretext is completely false, the exchange that takes place is honest and potent. Aside from the famous personages who play themselves, the film’s other main characters are actors. They insert themselves seamlessly through events that actually took place in Sarajevo (i.e. that were not planned for the shooting of the film). I believe this technique echoes Godard’s belief that people have faith in the imaginary, and doubt reality. Even though the narrative curve is atypical--there is no climax, and the two main characters never meet--it offers that which the spectator needs in order to submit himself or herself to a film: the imaginary. Thanks to the lens of narrativity, the varied documentary subjects (the Israeli/Palestine conflict, the symbolic rebuilding of the Mostar Bridge, the Native American plight, the future of digital filmmaking) whose philosophical links would otherwise not be considered are conjoined into a field where realities point to imaginaries and vice versa. Throughout the film, the characters acknowledge the inability of images and words to represent certain atrocities, and strange way by which imaginary representations are at times more believable than the truth.

Mob Films Manifesto

Part of the 'Robot Series' these two films push the boundaries of documentary by exploring technology's influence through a collaborative mix of digital filmmaking and voiceover software.

Digital cinema: The transformation of film practice and aesthetics

This article discusses the emergence of digital cinema and the effect it has had on the practice of filmmaking as well as on the aesthetics of cinema. The article does not look at digital cinema as a kind of technological determinism; rather, digital film-making is looked at as creating new possibilities for cinemas around the world. The article proposes a new way of thinking about digital cinema that locates it within the process of cinematic development, yet that also recognizes the medium's uniqueness in transforming the relationship between the director, the actors and the audience, as well as in impacting narrative structure, performance and image. The article applies this theory to the case of cinema in Iran, where digital technology is having a remarkable effect on the existence of the industry in a new, freer form.

Report: Travelling Through Layers: Inuit Artists Appropriate New Technologies

This article discusses how Igloolik Isuma Productions, the internationally acclaimed independent Inuit production company behind Atanarjuat The Fast Runner, has appropriated communication technologies such as digital filmmaking and the internet to articulate a distinct and authentic Inuit voice in global media discourse.