ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to acknowledge and express my deepest appreciation to my, faculty Miss. Utkarsha Kotian, who offered continuous advice and encouragement during the past two years.
I would like to express my very sincere gratitude to my thesis advisor, Mr. Somnath Sen who gave me valuable advice regarding this thesis. Without his guidance and help, this thesis would not have been possible.
Abstract
Film is an art, and it is also a product of the development of science and technology. Without science and technology, humans cannot have this magical art that can make our fantasies become reality. Throughout the history of film, every revolutionary technological advancement has dominated the development direction of film. However, since 1960s, with the emergence of digital technology, the whole film industry entered a new era. People all over the world can experience an unprecedented pleasant amazement and audio-visual experience when they are watching films. Meanwhile, digital technology has become a powerful tool, allowing many filmmakers who have the great passion to make their own movies easier than before. Now, everyone can make “films”.
This paper studied the evolution of the film industry under the emergence of digital technology.
Introduction
The emergence of the film producing industry must pay tribute to technology, which offers opportunity for people to dream and presents moving pictures in front of our eyes. According to Jieyi Wang (2011), “It should be noted that the Lumière Family is considered as the inventor of film exactly because they offered technology that supports group watching, unlike the Kinetoscope by Edison that only allows one people to watch film alone”. After that, technological progress has had a progressively important impact on film: from silent film to sound film, black and white to color, followed by wide-screen, digital, huge-screen, and 3D films, even the revolutionary VR film. All these are products of technology in the field of film.
Compared to film revolutions ignited by technological development, how digital technology shapes the movie from the 1960s is the most impressive. Current research efforts on the relationship between digital technology and film are concentrated on changes to film form, film production, digitalised distribution.
Advanced technology brings various possibilities to the future of the film, and studying the history of film industry, firstly, helps us to gain a full picture of digital technology, and secondly, promotes analysis of the new form of American film industry and even the world's film industry after total digitalisation.
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1. 1 Research Background
Research Status of Digital Technology and Film Industry Development
For the present, research on the relationship between film and technology, including digital technology, has paid most attention to technology-enabled changes to and improvement of films, i.e. how digitalisation transforms the way film is produced and distributed, but about film production. In this field, American film scholar James E Spellerberg and his book Technology and the Film Industry: The Adoption of Cinemascope (1980) mainly explores how wide screen technology expand the in film creation and how audiences feel about wide-screen film. However, Spielberg has not dug in the whole industry.
Beside, Marc Brownett, in his article How technology has affected and influenced the film industry and cinema (1980) published on Digital Media: Research and Analysis, quoted many famous films and gave a reasonable, comprehensive analysis on how technological progress affects film production, seeing and distribution.
Another American scholar Barry Salt discussed in his Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (1992) about the relationship between film technology and film style, and teased out the interwoven relations between technology and film. Pitifully, it only focuses on film itself.
Research Status of Film History and Film Technology History
Work on film history is voluminous, including the classic Histoire du cinéma mondial (1972) by Georges Sadoul of France, and Crafton’s History of the American Cinema (1999)
1.2 Definition of Digital Technology and Other Relevant Concepts Digital Technology
Digital technology embraces digital electronics, and utilises certain equipment to transform picture, text, sound, image and other information into binary digits that can be recognised by electronic computer, which then computes, processes, stores, transmits, spreads and resume these information. It is named as digital technology because the computer is used to encode, compress and decode the information in computing and storage.
Digital technology in this paper refers to all computer technologies applied in film. It can be divided into two: technologies that used to produce the film itself, i.e. digital graphic processing technology based on computer graphics, including digital imaging, HD technology, non-linear editing, and scene design; and digital film transmission technologies represented by digital video, network, digital distribution and digital projection (Jieyi, 2011).
4K/UHD Technology
The UHD technology, according to Cotton (2013), Ultra HD (also known as “Ultra High Definition” / “Super Hi-Vision” / “Ultra HDTV” / “UHD” / “UHDTV” / “4K” / “8K”), “is a video format conceptualized by the Japanese public broadcasting network, NHK. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) announced that the official term “Ultra HD” would be used for any display with a 16 x 9 ratio with at least 1 digital input cable carrying a minimum resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 square pixels”
Virtual Reality (VR)
Virtual Reality (VR) is the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment. Unlike traditional user interfaces, VR places the user inside an experience. Instead of viewing a screen in front of them, users are immersed and able to interact with 3D worlds. By simulating as many senses as possible, such as vision, hearing, touch, even smell, the computer is transformed into a gatekeeper to this artificial world. The only limits to near-real VR experiences are the availability of content and cheap computing power.
Film Industry
The film industry or motion picture industry comprises the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking, i.e., film production companies, film studios, cinematography, film production, screenwriting, pre-production, post production, film festivals, distribution; and actors, film directors and other film crew personnel
Purpose of Study
This paper sorts out the milestones in film development before the emergence of digital technologies, and also discusses changes to the film industry for 40 years after application of digital technologies, including not only changes to film itself, but also changed to the film industry. In addition, this paper predicts what new technologies will dominate the film industry in the future.
Challenges and innovation: there are few existing works that specialise on the relationship between digital technology and the film industry. Most of them target certain sectors and how progress in digital technology affects the film and audiences.
Before the sound
In the very early stage of the film industry, Eadweard Muybridge can be seemed as the ancestor of the motion picture technology. He was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. As described by Muybridge himself (1887), in order to research some photographic studies for Stanford, Muybridge planned to take a series of photos on 15 June 1878 at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm. He placed numerous large glass-plate cameras in a line along the edge of the track; the shutter of each was triggered by a thread as the horse passed. The path was lined with cloth sheets to reflect as much light as possible. He copied the images in the form of silhouettes onto a disc to be viewed in a machine he had invented, which he called a zoopraxiscope. Afterwards, Muybridge happened to find "persistence of vision" and used it to achieve serial photography, and the display he produced offers vivid picture. This inspired Edison to invent Kinetoscope Kinetoscope, a rectangle cabinet with a 2.5mm convex mirror on its top. In it, a strip of 35 mm wide film was passed rapidly between a lens and an electric light bulb while the viewer peered through a peephole. Behind the peephole was a spinning wheel with a narrow slit that acted as a shutter, permitting a momentary view of each of the 46 frames passing in front of the shutter every second. The result was a lifelike representation of persons and objects in motion. However, Edison's Kinetoscope has a critical defect: only one can see the motion pictures at one time, and Edison could not solve the problem of the proper method to transport the film, film transmission; (Hendricks, 1966) the Lumière Brothers brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas and Louis Jean, were the first filmmakers in history, found inspiration in the sewing machine, and presented a perfect solution to transport the film by using Kinetograph (Cook, 2004). However, the Kinetograph was invented by Dickson and his team at the Edison lab in 1890s, and it is an innovative motion picture camera with rapid intermittent to photograph movies for in-house experiments. Also, it combines shooting, projecting and printing in one and offers infinite possibilities for group film watching, and 16 frames/second projection saves a lot of film stock.If the instinctive desire and dream for "replay of reality" in the
subconscious mind is the primary cause for the birth of film, then the development of technology is the immediate cause for the emergence of film for making this dream come true. Both the film developing from chemistry and perspective principle from physics shows that film is a product of technology, and the introduction of new technologies like sound and colour further accelerates the development of film.
Introduction of Sound Technology
Although film was invented more than 100 years ago, but during the first three decades since it was born, there is nothing people can hear from the cinema. However, these films with no voice are called silent films. A silent film is a film with no synchronised recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue .
The silent film could only record or replay the visual content of "reality", and the absence of sound denies its perfect recreation of "reality". Despite its emergence, film disappoints the audiences in "replay of reality". In fact, long before the sound technology was used in movies, people had been trying to make films associate with the sound; for instance, in the 1920s, the musicians and some small orchestra would often play music to accompany the films in the cinema; before the advent of the real cinema sound system, many scientists and inventors had been working hard to make the movie "Speak". In those days, there were hundreds of patent records about the movie sound technology in the world, the most representative and influential one of which is the "Vitaphone".
Thanks to Vitaphone, The Jazz Singer, a mediocre silent, left its name in the history of films. The Jazz Singer recorded the sound into a disc of 100/3 rounds/sec, which was then played with vitaphone . On October 6, 1927, when audiences watched the movie once again, they surprisingly heard what characters said. This marked the advent of a new era. Only one year later, there were 500 cinemas in America for sound movies, and the figure rose to 5,200 in 1929. Soon after, the revolutionary photographic sound track which can carry sounds on films emerged. Thereupon, many film makers and exhibitors jointly developed the standard for the width of sound track, and made projection speed of 24 frames one second, which is still in use today.
With technologies, sound, an indispensable element in daily life was incorporated into films, accelerating the development of the film industry. The appearance of sound films in 1930s also made the amount of movie viewers double.
In fact, sound technologies brought overall impact to the film industry at that time. Almost all relevant industries chains developed: filming equipment and consumables were updated because of sound technologies, and live recording evolved to post recording. The performance of actors were also influenced. For example, actors who were non-native English speakers were gradually forgotten by the public for non-fluent English or unpleasant pronunciation. When film sound technologies first appeared, silent movies could duel with sound films in terms of distribution and projection, but then gradually quit the arena of history amid growing interest in sound movies. With the end of silent movies, a wave of sound film cinemas swept across the world.
Vivid Color
The real world has not only sound and frames but also beautiful colors. When we "heard" movies, we started thinking about the application of colors in films. Since the birth of films, many creative color treatment methods have been applied to present different colors in a film. In 1920s, nearly 80% of Hollywood silent movies were manually colored in post-production (Maltby, 2003). However, the artificial coloring was very time-consuming as every frame had to be colored, and the color would fade as time went by. Despite this, some epic movies emerged in this age. For example, Battleship Potemkin, a black-and-white film by Sergei Eisenstein who is a master of the Soviet Union Montage School, was manually colored one frame by one, so that audiences could see a red flag rising on the grand Battleship Potemkin. This intense visual shock to audiences at that time could hardly imagine by people today (Jieyi, 2011).
Battleship Potemkin is not a true color film. Real color films (Chao, 2008) are defined as those with three-color technicolor (red/green/blue). ‘Vanity Fair’ in 1935 demonstrated the real sense of color film. The process developed by Technicolor required sync photography of special cameras onto three different films to separately record three colors (red, green, blue). The three films were then incorporated into a different film for softer, more natural color. In the 1950s, (Shaojing, 1982) Eastman Kodak Company developed Eastmancolor, a widely successful "single-strip color" processes, which eventually displaced the more cumbersome Technicolor three strip
Indeed, color technologies did not bring as profound drastic changes to film production as sound technologies, but color pictures silently evolved and influenced the film industry during the 1940s to 1970s. The evolution of color technologies in this period is no doubt the third technological revolution in the film industry, and the sound technology makes scenes on the screen more "realistic". It also further impacts film shooting, for example, light application and tunes. Just like sound movies, color film process. In the following years, Eastmancolor was widely recognized by the world, and it also inspired the birth of Warnercolor and Metrocolor. According to statistics (Figure 4) from Jieyi Wang (2011), the production of color movies first exceeded black-and-white movies in the late 1960s. Indeed, color technologies did not bring as profound drastic changes to film production as sound technologies, but color pictures silently evolved and influenced the film industry during the 1940s to 1970s. The evolution of color technologies in this period is no doubt the third technological revolution in the film industry, and the sound technology makes scenes on the screen more "realistic". It also further impacts film shooting, for example, light application and tunes. Just like sound movies, color movies also promoted technological improvements in film shooting and projection.
The chaotic time after color
When sound, color and image jointed together, people began to pursue a higher leveled film watching experience. Therefore, some new technologies have been invented such as “Stereoscopic film”,“wide-screen film”, and “70mm format film”. But because the technologies were only improved in terms of the size and width of screen as well as the viewing environment, the influence on the whole film industry was not revolutionary. The technologies were not fundamental and didn’t achieve the effect as the sound film and color film triggered before through their influence on the entire film industry (Robertson, 1988). Afterwards, digital technology showed up.
Influences on Shooting
Actually, the influence on digital technology during the shooting process is intuitive. In the past, traditional motion picture camera used 8mm and 16mm film format. During shooting, the shooting time was often limited within 10 minutes. Besides, the traditional motion picture cameras were extremely heavy and could not even control by hand in some special shooting scene, which was quite inconvenient for the photographer. Therefore, the emergence of digital camera has changed the situation.
Digitalization of Shooting Equipment
First, based on its digital technology and physical principles, a digital camera is highly precise computerized equipment providing digital display modes for the convenience of the shooting process. Second, it provides important data reference for the post-production of film and enables the post editing very quickly. Third, the storage medium of digital camera will no longer be limited to a single format like film, because digital cameras use digital memory cards or a plug-in hard disk to replace the film.Fourth, professional digital camera manufacturers such as Arriflex, Sony and RED have all developed small and handheld new models that are nearly as good as large traditional cameras. Also, these cameras allow filmmakers to make steady moves even when the film crew is shooting under some extreme conditions.
Digital Format Shooting:
Another huge impact brought by the digital video camera to the film industry is that people are able to obtain the feedback of video and audio immediately. Directors and cameramen can get the actual details and effects shot just now (including image and sound) right away via the external monitors and other equipment of the digital video camera, which contributes to the decision and controlling of whether it is needed to add shooting, reshoot or confirm the direction of the shoots in future, and greatly improves the mastering of the entire shooting site by directors and other creators. While in the past, with the traditional film shooting, directors and other creators usually can only see how the post-productions were on the second day samples meeting (James, 2005).
After adopting shooting in the digital format, editing and shooting can theoretically proceed almost simultaneously. This shortens the interval between shooting and editing in traditional film generating, and makes post-production faster and more economical.
Digital shooting, up to now, has always been considered the weakest link in film industry digitization. Even in Hollywood, the amount of feature films shot utilizing digital technologies only accounted for one fifth of the total amount. Many famous directors, such as Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, have said they will not abandon film, the most classic film shooting media (James, 2005). However, in low-end independent films, digital shooting has become the mainstream, greatly lowered the barriers of shooting films.
Influences on Post-production
Digital Editing
The conventional film editing before was all finished on the cutting benches. In the face of over hundreds of thousand inches of films, the editor would rearrange the scenes according to director’s requirement and the editor’s own understanding of the creative needs of the production (Evans, 2005). This work needs editing instruments to cut, separate and connect the cine-films, which can be called the real art of editing. Upon the entry into digital times, owing to the appearance of digital intermediate (see below), more productions have come to be edited using computer digital technology formats. Compared to conventional editing, digital editing and image processing appear to be more simple and convenient, and have saved a good deal of money.
Digital editing adopts the concept of non-linear editing, leaving post producers flexible creation space. Non-linear editing uses computers to rearrange scenes. One advantage of non-linear editing is it can instantly access element of image and sound in real time, and no longer needs to linear thousands of feet of film repeatedly as in the past (Buck, 2007).
Secondly, the program materials need only to be acquired once, and then can be used for multiple versions, saving human and material resources, and increasing work efficiency. In 1984, George Lucas used Edit Droid and Sound Droid system developed by himself to assemble one of the first films finished in non-linear fashion (Buck, 2007). With the development of digital editing technologies, editors and producers gradually abandoned the conventional physical editing process.
Digital Intermediate ( DI )
Intermediate is an indispensable link in traditional film making. The first edition cine-film shot by cameraman is called “camera original” after been developed and printed, which is all the crystallization of the handwork of film crew (James, 2005).The data will be sealed immediately, because if the “camera original” is damaged, the first-hand material is lost. Before the “camera orignial” is sealed, it will be copied, which is the first version of “intermediate”.
In over one hundred years after the film was born, this work has always been undertaken by departments of the film laboratory, which is finished by means of traditional chemical processing and scissors and tape. During this more than one hundred years, although the film processing technologies have been continuously developed, it has not become significantly faster or more cost effective .
Digital Special Effects
Before the development of digital technology, special effects were normally physical special effects, such as the primitive miniature, fireworks technology, and the later animal-robot technology. The appearance of Terminator 2 in 1980s made audiences have great interest in visual effects for the first time, and just because this special effect brought people visual wonders, it urged more film workers to devote himself to this new style means of production (Guanglv, 1998).
In the film special effect industry in digital times, the production and application of special effects rely on computer technology platforms, which enable the special effects to be more lifelike. In addition, digital special effect is also a high-end technology in film digital technology application. The current digital technology application in film special effect presents in following aspects:
Creation of Virtual Characters
Before computer graphics (CG) technology, special roles like monsters, devils and gods and legendary figures were all realised by actors wearing special costumes or film artists using real objects or models to form things up. But at the moment, producing special roles figures can be realized by 3D scanner scanning the real person or role model, and post rending with strong computer special effect software to form the CG role modelings. In addition to that, virtual characters’ actions are usually formed with motion capture technology, namely the Motion Capture collecting real person’s or animal’s action (figure 10), or referring to images in video recordings, which are all established based on computer technology.
Creation of Virtual Scene
The endless ocean, fierce Bengal tiger and fantastic cannibal island appeared in ‘Life of Pi’ which won Oscar’s Best Film of 2012 did not shoot scenes in real places as what traditional films had done in the past, but rebuilt the scenes with digital technologies against nature on the ocean alone. In fact, to achieve the largest degree of reality, creators need to acquire professional training to know how to acutely observe the tiny differences between live-action and CG scenery and make adjustments, thus making the two objects integrate perfectly (“Rhythm & Hues Makes Skies Soar”.
Digital Synthesis
In late 1980s, the arrival of ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ (1988) astonished movie fans around the world, which was the first attempt at using digital synthesis technology. It managed to make the real character and painted animation figure appear on the same frame, allowing the audience to feel a fantastic world. The later movie Space Jam also entirely used digital synthesis technology to make Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny compete on the same stage.
This digital synthesis technology mixes video and audio materials of multiple digital formats into a single video-audio file via professional post producing software on computer, which may generally include four major steps of color correction, geometric fluctuation, filter and picture synthesis (Zhengning, 1998). This synthesis technology changes traditional film making vast amounts on screen effects easier and less expensive to create. This technology, which enables the authentic roles and characters to “appear in the same scene” has also been utilized by parts of film- television industry. The result of the application can be seen very often in children’s TV shows and other narrative TV production.
The Impact of Digital Technologies to Film Distribution
The first digitally distributed film was ‘Star War Prequel I’ (1999) by American director George Lucas in 1999. As one of the earliest Sony films shot with digital cameras, it was digitally presented in four American cinemas, winning a lot of applause . The success of the film depended on the continuous technological development. Early in 1987, Texas Instruments developed Digital Light Processing (DLP). At present, this technology has been a leading technology for digital projection in commercial films across the globe, and even the industrial standard. Many film production companies have projection equipment with DLP. As time goes on, the introduction of digital technologies has contributed to geometric growth in film distribution, which is much more advanced than before. This thesis will then discuss specific impact of digital technologies on film distribution.
Digital Projection
With digital technology, films on the screen are presented in nearly perfect condition without declining brightness and color, dirty spots and scratches caused by damaged film. At the same time, digital technologies preserve and present original high-fidelity sound, creating a true, exciting stereo ambience for audiences .
Digital Film Distribution
Traditionally, films were delivered by distributors to cinema projectors through simple means of transportation. Movies always had many reels which must be contained in a special large box. This brought great challenges to movie distribution for not only inconvenient transportation but great space for storage and manpower for maintenance (Fan, 2010). The digital distribution of a film is possible only with an encrypted high-capacity hard disk that can store vast amount of data. Thanks to digital technologies, audiences can more easily enjoy films through different platforms, and cinema is no longer their sole choice. The emergence of online video sites like Netflix and Hulu is a prime example.
Digital transmission of the film content
The transmission and receiving of film became easier through digital method of network and satellites. For example, in 2002, before the distribution of ‘Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith’ (2002) by 20th Century Fox, the Culver City digital film laboratory in California transmited the global teaser to the digital center in Singapore, and it took for only 10 minutes to finish the transmission of the teaser with a total capacity of several hundreds GB. In the past, the transportation of film was not only costly in time, but also wasted a great amount of labor and money.
Production Cost and Efficiency
With the full introduction of digital technologies into the film industry, a larger amount of special effects are seen in the production and operation of films, especially those blockbusters. Of course, high technological content means high cost, namely lots of capital is required to maintain the application of leading technologies in the film industry. Digital equipment, including high definition digital cameras, a set of non-linear editing
Work stations and super computers for special effects always cost much more than traditional equipment, up to several million dollars (Liu Fan, 2010). However, it is worth noting that, digital technologies brought to film production
and operation not only higher cost, but higher production efficiency and more scientific operation cycle, in particular more enjoyment and attraction to films realized by visual effects. Computerized information processing, digital storage of frames and audio and transmission media improves the operational efficiency of every link in the film industry, and makes many tasks which are traditionally complex and time-consuming easier and more convenient (Allen, 2005).
The Future of Digital Technology 4K movies
4K Ultra High Definition Digital Cinema was also called “p”, namely, latitudinally 4000 pixels and longitudinally 2160 pixels, with the total pixel exceeding 800 million. This equals to 2k of another projector and four times that of HDTV resolution. Resolutions of 2k digital cinema and HDTV are roughly the same, but resolution of HDTV is 1920×1080. If theater is displaying 4k movies, no matter what position in the theater, the audience can clearly watch every detail of the scene. However, as recently as 2013, only 10% of theaters were able to project 4k and UHD contents.
Globally, Europe and other developed countries are accelerating the upgrade implementation in 4k digital cinemas. Among them, the three major US cinemas – Regal, AMC and Cinemark are installing 4k cinema projection system in their cinemas. Regal and AMC use Sony SXRD technology. Earlier in 2009, the 2 companies respectively signed agreements with Sony on 6500 sets and 4500 sets 4k projection system installation. On the other hand, Cinemark, which adopted DLP 25 technology, has been planning to install more than 4,000 sets of 4k projection systems in the United States and Latin America. In addition, many European cinemas, middle and small American cinemas, and even Asian countries such as Korea, Japan and China started to upgrade 4k digital cinemas in succession. Theaters in Europe, the UK, Switzerland and the Netherlands and other European countries have also signed an agreement with Sony to install 4k.
A brief analysis and summary of the advantage and the main problems existing in the development of 4K digital cinema are followed as below. Advantages of developing 4K digital cinema are:
•Wide screen, high-quality definition, and excellent audio and visual effects are eternal targets of movie audiences. 4K digital cinema is equipped with a super high- quality definition and visual effects, which can greatly improve audience's viewing experiences as well as competitiveness and influence for movies in traditional and new media (Archer, 2014).
•The popularization and application of 4K digital cinema will effectively break the monopoly of IMAX in the giant screen film industry and significantly reduce the costs of super-large screen projection system. IMAX essentially belongs to 70mm film projection technology, which has been very backward among technologies in the digital era. At the same time, the launch of digital IMAX projection system is an improved 2K projection system, not a 4K projection system in its true sense. Many key innovations are reflected and injected into 4K digital cinemas (Archer, 2014).
Practical problems existing in the development of 4K digital cinema:
• Obviously, 4K sources are insufficient at present. Annual output of 4K films in the world is about a dozen in recent years, among which most are produced by Columbia Pictures.
• That the limited spaces of most theaters is a reason for screen width shortage, which making it is difficult to give full play and reflect technological advantages and visual effects of 4K film (Archer, 2014).
Virtual Reality Technology
Film technology developed regarding black and white to colorful screen, silent to sound, 2D to 3D, panoramic screen to IMAX and so on, which reveals human being’s continuous efforts for the purpose of ultimate pursuit towards vivid experiences of the reality, especially the emerging virtual reality technology (referred to VR). By using computer technology and digital space, which are highly similar to reality, VR allows users to timely feel things in the virtual space without any limitations. VR was applied to movie creation so as to let the audience completely immerse in it without relying on lights and space of the cinema. Film-makers all around the world draw attention to VR since it was born (Yanming, 2016). After a few years of development, it gradually advanced out from obscure conception to real products and experiences which are tangible and feasible.
This is a kind of completely immersive, interactive viewing experience.
In 2012, VR movie made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in the United States. Since then, VR movies came to light and gradually become more familiar to the public. At Sundance Film Festival, for example, the number of new VR productions has multiplied in recent years: four in 2014, nine in 2015, while 33 this year. According to rough statistics, there are more than a dozen Hollywood directors who started to throw themselves into VR filmmaking.
So, what’s the audio-visual experience of watching VR movie? Let us take the VR version of ‘Star Wars’ that distributed by Lucasfilm as an example. The audience wears a head-mounted display and every scene they watch exists in the outer space of the movie. They can turn around their heads by virtue of a gyroscope to choose perspectives freely. Viewers are able to observe this novelty from different angles when a "vehicle" passes by (Yanming, 2016).
Published on the Sundance Film Festival in 2015, the VR movie Fury is similar to ‘Godzilla’ (2014) and both of them belong to the disaster movie genre. Director constantly changing shooting method during production, so it changes the perspective to see people's reactions to chaos as if they are living in the city that is being invaded by the monster. Therefore, a “virtual reality" viewing experience is enjoyed by the audience.
Possibly, the curiosity and expectations we poured into VR movies are just like the feelings people had when watching The Lumiere Brothers 100 years ago.
In the study of this subject, the following research methods are mainly adopted: on the one hand, the existing historical records and books of authority are collected and consulted to understand the historical evolution and cultural characteristics of research objects. In other words, the relations between digital technology and films are sorted out from a historical perspective, and digital technology is analyzed from the standpoint of filmology.
On the other hand, the comparative method, inductive method, and data collection and analysis method are utilized to combine first-hand and secondary academic materials. Industrial economics and film history are integrated to perfect the analysis of the influence of digital technology on the film industry. On this basis, the relevant materials and data are combined in the context of present digital condition to further analyze the current situation of film industry and look into the future development trend of films.
This research also conducted in-depth interviews for those professional filmmakers and professors. The researcher believes that the experts in the film industry all have strong opinions on the way things should be but depending on who you are speaking to, the opinions tend to change. Based on the information previously researched and mentioned throughout this work, three university professors, and two former filmmakers were interviewed. Their job functions are as follows: Li Dan, the scholar of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Lily Mao, the former channel director of CCTV, Jiaran Wang, the assistant professor of Beijing Film Academy, and Jianfeng Du, the professor of Beijing Union University. Each of them answered a set of interview questions and gave their point of view based upon personal experience and industry knowledge.