Reality for Pixels

Reality for Pixels

In Lev Menovich’s Essay, “What Is Digital Cinema”, he talks about the advances in cinema and the moving picture. One point that he makes that I found incredibly interesting is the fact that he says once live video is uploaded to a computer the computer reads it as it would any other image it reads it in pixels. This allows one to skew reality, to animate it to ones need. Life action as Lev Menovich says is, “reduced to just another graphic, no different from images that were created manually. One example he uses is the opining scene is forest Gump with the feather floating through air. Although this is meant to look real it is not. The feather was filmed on blue screen in different positions and animated together.

This idea as a whole is fascinating. We no longer have reality and not reality in film. We no longer have real and animated, or live action and special effect separate, we have them together. For example when “Star Wars” first came out, the special effect in it were amazing, no one had ever scene effects like it before, but at the same time, except for the light saber scenes characters were not interacting much with special effects. Unlike today with say “Transformers”, or even “Star Wars Revenge of the Sith.” We have characters that are digitally made interacting in a “real” environment. The fact that today’s technology could make Yoda on a computer and have him doing back flips all over the screen or have giant robots interact with humans and turn into things we use in everyday life. And then there are Movies like “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”, which was completely shot on blue screen, everything the characters interact with was digitally made. It fascinates me how far we come but at the same time I am hoping that we don’t through reality completely out the window.