The theme of ‘blurred boundaries’, and the way in which one might relate such a theme to the theory and practice of digital filmmaking, offers numerous approaches in which a visual interpretation could be produced. Through the creation of our own film, we set out to engage with and respond to various issues surrounding the progression of filmmaking into the digital era. The majority of issues surrounding the art of digital filmmaking centred around how the concept has changed the way in which cinema is identified. Holly Willis establishes digital cinema as a transformation from cinema’s original form; “Rather than transcription, information recorded with digital video goes through a process of conversion. […] As a result, digital information may be endlessly duplicated, manipulated or transformed” (2005, p. 6). Inspired by this definition, we aimed to create a film that responded digital filmmaking as the process of recording the moving image electronically, allowing for manipulation on digital devices. Such an identity indeed clarifies digital film as a complete departure from original forms of image capturing, through the recording of light onto a reel. In developing a project that examined such aspects of digital filmmaking through our chosen concept of memory, it became apparent to us in the early stages that the process of exploration and analysis were just as, if not more, important than the final outcome. The following account will focus predominantly on the theoretical aspects of the project, and proceed to outline the way in which we responded to the chosen issues, illustrating what alternative methods we would have used to better our film with the benefit of hindsight.
Initial ideas for the concept of our film emerged from the analysis of various articles exploring the ontology of filmmaking, and how its objective purpose transformed with the digital age. Lev Manovich’s What is Digital Cinema? (1995) focuses on the concept of filmmaking and recording the moving image, and its purpose before and after the digital revolution. He compares cinema’s insistence that it is “recording the real”, rather than “creating the never-was” (1995, p. 4) of special effects, to the eventual embracing of special effects in the digital age. Manovich establishes digital cinema as creating “a new kind of realism” (1995, p. 5). Indeed the birth of special effects has transformed the cinematic definition of ‘realism’; a concept that we felt was important to address in our own film, and one that I will elaborate in detail shortly.
Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib’s Digital Cinema: the transformation of film practice and aesthetics (2006) provided a coherent connection to the information we obtained from Manovich’s discussion in generating a new form of realism. In locating the digital revolution within the process of industrial cinematic development, its theorised positioning in the chronology of filmmaking reinforced our argument that digital cinema has long-abandoned its original purpose. The aspects of this article which we took to be useful in our own research focused on the degree to which footage can be manipulated, and exactly how. Ganz and Khatib explain, “There is a physical limit on the number of cuts that can be made on a piece of celluloid, and on the amount of manipulation that an image can take.” (2006, p. 25). In using Manovich’s statement regarding how the digital method of filmmaking sees images as pixels (2007, p. 4), the juxtaposition between a celluloid frame and a computer-generated frame from the same scene presents to us a stark difference in how much the image can be manipulated, distorted, and ultimately, transformed.
Figure 1: Screenshots from Persona (1966). Source: YouTube
Using the information gathered from these articles, we began to brainstorm initial thoughts of how to integrate the theme of blurred boundaries into our exploration of digital film. The combination of image manipulation and ‘representing the real’ generated ideas examining the relation of the camera to our own eyes. We were inspired by the opening sequence in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), where a boy is seen to be reaching out at the camera (or viewer), which quickly cuts to him extending his hand toward screen, depicting a face (see Figure 1). It was the degree of self-reflection evoked from this sequence that furthered our interest to compare the images captured from a lens, to images captured in our own memories.
Additionally, Steven Shaviro’s ‘Emotion Capture: Affect in Digital Film’ (2007) juxtaposes Bazin’s and Barthes’ theories to explore the issue of subjectivity in digital filmmaking, analysing the extent to which one can ‘rely’ on the digital form to present a ‘reliable’ image of the past. What Bazin referred to as “the myth of total cinema” theorised that the entire history of film could be seen as a progressive movement toward an ultimate goal: “a total and completed representation of reality”. (2004, p. 17-22, cited Shaviro, 2007, p. 63). It appears the evolution of filmmaking technology has driven us closer to the ‘goal’ than ever, but in a different way to what Bazin would have imagined. This owes itself to the way that image-making has changed the nature of reality itself, to the ‘new kind of realism’ that Manovich describes. We began to draw comparisons with this ‘representation of reality’ to the realities that our minds construct when recollecting a memory. Bazin’s myth, as enunciated by Shaviro is exactly that, a myth or an ideal that, due to the progression of digital cinema, has become impossible – the “representation of reality” (2004, p. 21, cited Shaviro, p. 63) is no longer attainable with the digital form. His concern with the “inescapable subjectivity” (2004, p. 12, cited Shaviro, p. 66) of the film camera provided an explicit link to a key part of our narrative; the inevitable distortion and manipulation of our own memories, owing to the subjective view in which they are seen and perceived. The concept that cinema no longer provides us with a legitimate reconstruction (owing to the unavoidable subjectivity of the digital image), was one we incorporated into our film by using the theme of memory construction. Our film would therefore argue that memory recall is, due to ‘inescapable subjectivity’, is inevitably unreliable in representing an utterly reliable account of the past.
Shaviro’s analysis of the digital form provided further inspiration in generating ideas for visual aesthetic. Shaviro uses the example of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), to explore “the pastness of the image, its untouchability, and its role as countermemory” (2007, p. 77). The film investigates notions surrounding the distortion and excision of memories, and the degree to which our subjective perception effects our desire to maintain memories in their original form. It is the way, however, that Gondry visually communicates such notions by using digital effects that makes Eternal Sunshine such a valuable reference for our project. “Gondry equates the process of memory erasure with the technology of digital film itself.” (Shaviro, 2007, p. 78). Indeed, the fundamental concept built upon the view that memories are stored in the brain, the same way digital information is stored electronically, was one that wholly resonated with our ideas. Whilst the development of our own narrative was influenced by the film’s key themes, we were conscious that in order for our film not to be compared with Eternal Sunshine, our ideas would have to contain another element to the notion of memory-storing and digital image-making.
In response to this issue, we constructed a story focusing on the theme of memory; although, unlike Eternal Sunshine, our narrative revolved around the theme of memory reconstruction, as opposed to memory removal. The story follows a nonlinear narrative, employed using two temporal periods. One is a room filled with polaroid images all depicting fragments of a memory at the beach; this location acts as a physical representation of the protagonist’s mind in the present day. He carefully studies the pictures, searching for an aspect of this particular memory that he cannot locate. The photographs serve as a link to the second location; as he looks through the images, parts of the memory come to life in his mind in partially distorted flashbacks, each revealing a new detail of the past. In switching between the present and the past, it soon becomes clear to the protagonist that the aspect of the memory that he has deliberately excised is another male character with whom he was romantically involved. It is not until the final scene that this male character is shown in his real, undistorted form. At the film’s climactic point, the protagonist becomes enraged at his partner’s rejection, and pushes him in front of a car, killing him.
Through much development and alteration, we effectively produced a story that critically explores the issues of digital film that we set out to engage with. Despite our narrative being abstract in addressing the concept of digital image-reconstruction at first glance, we felt that it was necessary for an experimental approach to be adopted in order for our film to be both captivating narratively, and contextually relevant. The parallels between our narrative and the underlying concept become less abstract and more explicit with the progression of the film; for example, the polaroid images provide an instance of manual image-recording. In turn, the memory scenes are visibly distorted through digital means, making a clear distinction between the legitimacy of a photograph ‘recording the real’, and a memory, (or digital recording), being subject to distortion. This ultimately provided us with two key themes; the concept of image reconstruction and the parallels it has on memory recollection; and the notion that the camera lens is largely similar to that of the human eye. As Ganz and Khatib theorise, “The digital camera does not forget. It sees everything and it records everything.” (2006, p. 25). Our narrative sets out to explore, and ultimately contradict this notion.
After finalising a script, we began to think of ways in which our film would visually respond to the contemporary issues that explored in our narrative. Given the experimental and abstract nature of our script, it was of utmost importance to capitalise on the visual aesthetic and cinematographic style. Our aim was to enhance the impact and understanding of the narrative, but also demonstrate its own exploration of digital manipulation. Referring once more to Shaviro’s analysis of Eternal Sunshine, he praises the use of cinematography to enhance the jarring effect of the nonlinear plot: “It has elaborate montage sequences that include strange angles, jump cuts, alternations between extreme close-ups and extreme long shots […]” (2007, p. 77). Such comments on visual style aided the development of our shot list. The unsettling effect produced by the techniques in Eternal Sunshine were elements that we felt was important to use; our story’s narrative requires an element of absorption from the audience, in that the main body of the narrative sees the viewer as the protagonist himself, delving into his mind in search of a corrupted memory.
Considering the experimental nature of our film, we decided to test a range of camera movements and angles during filming. The theme of disfigured memories and the presence of flashbacks served to evoke psychological unease, to reflect the discomfort that the protagonist was feeling. It was therefore important that our use of cinematography reflected the emotion that we wanted the audience to feel. After experimenting with several camera techniques, we settled with using handheld POV shots, to indicate to viewers that they were watching specific aspects of the memory the protagonist remembers.
One of the most challenging scenes to film was the climax of the story, in which our protagonist pushes his love interest in front of a car. The sequence posed difficulties for both our actors and the crew; in order to evoke a sense of dramatic suspense, quick cutting would have been an optimal method of enhancing the scene’s intensity. However, the decision to use POV shots for all memory footage was accountable for our inability to evoke the dramatic effect needed in this final sequence. Consequently, we opted to excise the shot entirely, instead editing the scene in such a way that the crash was inferred, rather than explicitly portrayed. We felt that this would be a more effective way of triggering dramatic suspense than physically showing the movement, and the sense of implicitness would add to the theme of unclear memories.
For the memory scenes filmed on a beach in Weston-Super-Mare, we used a Sony FS100 camera. The camera disappointingly produced a somewhat dull image, in part due to poor weather conditions, despite altering its exposure and ISO. Upon watching our footage of the beach scene on a computer, it occurred to us that we would need to use a DSLR camera to film the present-day scenes. It would not only allow more freedom to alter the lens settings as we filmed but also smoother handheld movements on account of its compact size. Though the decision to use two different cameras was initially made due to technical difficulties, the choice worked in our favour in terms of style – using different cameras allowed the footage to be further distinguished visually; the DSLR, being foremost a photography camera, produced a more vibrant, clear image than the Sony, producing two rather different ‘styles’ of image recording. One cannot ignore the links that this had on the wider context we were exploring in the narrative, regarding the progression of a camera’s progressing ability to ‘represent the real’.
My role as the post-production editor proved to be both challenging and rewarding. Given the abundance of footage we had gathered from experimenting with camera angles and visual language, our first rough cut was barely cohesive; in hindsight, we would have saved time in selecting our footage carefully and organising them into scenes before creating a timeline. Working with a nonlinear narrative made the configuration of our footage much more difficult; however, the use of the polaroid photographs helped us considerably in linking the memory scenes with the present-day scenes both visually and narratively. We initially intended to link shots of the polaroids with the beach footage by pairing identical frames from each of the scenes together, but we soon noticed that the photographs and the camera footage produced images that, despite containing the same subject, were too different to match. The issue clearly related to the fundamental concept we set out to explore, in that the images captured from a manual camera were unavoidably different to that of a digital camera. It illustrates the theme of manual image-recording juxtaposing digital image-recording – manual imaging took the form of polaroid photographs, and the digital image recording is his memory.
The bulk of editing our film involved the use of manipulating and distorting the memory sequences. The purpose of such manipulation was twofold; to create a visible distinction between two time frames, but also illustrate the incoherence of the memory our protagonist was trying to recollect, to symbolise the distorted boundaries between memory and reality.
Although, as aforementioned, using a different film camera for each location warranted some visual distinction between the two scenes, we felt the use of post-production image manipulation would better distinguish the separation between memory and reality. We began distorting the sequence by altering the linear form of the footage, using techniques such as jump cuts and quick repetition of two adjacent frames to create a fragmented, jittery effect. The implementation of such techniques become more frequent and intense as the protagonist’s flashbacks become more dramatic – reflecting his increasing fear of discovering the truth, and heightening tension towards the climax of the film. We additionally implemented the use of special effects to alter the aesthetic of the image. Initially, we set out to use Adobe After Effects, as the programme would enable us to blur solely the figure of our protagonist’s love interest, perhaps creating a subtler image distortion. It soon occurred to us, however, that the software was too advanced for us to achieve the effect, therefore settling with the visual effects that Final Cut Pro 7 contained to further alter the memory scenes. Although we wanted to create a subtle effect to reflect Manovich’s claim that the digital form is “a new kind of realism” (1995, p. 5), this was ultimately not possible given the lack of time we had to learn the technical skills required to produce such effects. One part of the film in which we did use After Effects was in the opening scene of the film, in which we used a close-up of our protagonist’s eye to make it look like a film chaser. Inspired by Persona, the effect aimed to introduce the concept of a camera lens paralleling our own visual fields. Although the distortion effects did not produce our intended aesthetic, the manipulation of the footage nevertheless responded to the notion of digital media’s potential to be manipulated. Furthermore, the alteration of our footage provided a conceptual reference, in that it highlighted the ease by which our own memories can be subject to change.
Lisa Purse notes, “Each invisible or imperceptible manipulation, transformation and omission is a filmmaking decision that has consequences for the way in which an image […] will be perceived and interpreted, a filmmaking decision that is, then, driven by both aesthetic and ideological factors.” (2013, p. 28). Purse’s statement encapsulates my conclusive arrival in exploring the impact of digital cinema. In researching the progression of the digital form, I have become more conscious of the apparent obsession to make visual transformations seem ‘invisible’, and the impact such transformations have on a film and its audience. I believe our film was effective in engaging with and responding to the issues we set out to explore, regarding the recording of images and the similarities between the digital form and memory. In hindsight, the outcome would have largely benefitted aesthetically if we had been able to use more technical editing software such as After Effects; nevertheless, we achieved our aim in exploring digital image construction from a conceptual, aesthetic and evaluative point of view.