CIN270Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Photorealism, Digital Imaging, Lucasfilm
Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017
CIN270Y1
CLASS 2.17
Entertainment and Dystopia
Why was there a turn to animation?
Data Processing
• The Ethnographic Photographer processing data in the form of fiction
• This real world has been translated into a fiction; the “ethnographic imagination”
• “cognitive mapping”
• popular films are made in part from “deposits of reality”
• they begin with deposits of “data”
The Obsolescence of Movies?
• The advent of the digital: a source of anxiety (why? No longer a photo reality)
• The possibility or manipulation or modification
• Once converted into information, any image can be altered
• Reordering images, changing pixels (easy to modify and alter mediums now)
The Obsolete
• “animated” films: “deposits of reality”?
• lens-based photography gathers deposits of data
• but “Drawing” has no need for cameras
• similarly, CG images need hardware and software for their creation…not cameras
• “cinema” appears obsolete in this case
Death of Cinema: Or, Relocation of Movies?
• Cinema: part of a larger history of moving images
• “photographic” cinema is ONE episode in this history
• 18th Century moving pictures were manually made (drawings)
• their animation meant physically moving (“animating”) them – halting, jerking, irregular
movements
Back to the Future: The Relocation of Movies
• Digital imaging recommits to “the artificial”
• this is less a “death of cinema” than a resumption of earlier practices
• nevertheless, “cinema” remains a fixture in such works…why?
• Why do Pixar movies strive for photo-realism?
• Can animation retain some link to reality?
Remediation
• Data processing…with a difference
• Animated texts (Pixar texts) draw from popular American myths and symbols
• Previous films, stories and pop culture
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