Loving digital for its beauty not just its practicality

For too long the distinct Colour, Grain, Artifacts, Judder and Flicker of celluloid film had been praised and celebrated as somehow the epitome of ‘cinema’. That these defects in the celluloid image were somehow what made cinema organic, special, magical….

As digital arrived and grew, it’s potency was celebrated in terms of Cost, Efficiency, Flexibility. For sometime now movies have been shot digital because of practical and logistical concerns but rarely for aesthetic ones. Subsequently the much voiced pursuit of digital camera hardware was to achieve “the look of film, with the flexibility of digital”…

This is a profoundly short-sighted view. Those who see Digital only as a logistic advancement rather than an aesthetic one are failing to see the future beyond their nose, failing to possess any vision for what could be?

Take a long hard look at this footage from the BBC.

This incredible image sequence, that seems to present a reality more Real than Real, a hyper-reality that is beyond what the human eye is capable of but which is embedded with Veritae actuality, an image that is impossible in any format but digital, was shot with a Typhoon HD4 camera in an underwater housing.

The specs of the HD4 are remarkably humble, Not 4k, not 2k, not even 1080 but 720p on a single CMOS sensor. However that sensor has an astounding light sensitivity of 1000ASA and can shoot up to 1000 frames per second.

Is there anyone who doubts that it’s just a matter of a time (short time at that) before we have such a camera capable of 2000fps at 4k??

Sometime ago I wrote a decidedly provocative piece entitled “I Love the look of Video” and in that article i observed that:

“I see chemical image of film and it just seems soft and dull and lifeless to me. I see the razor sharpness and the infinite flexibility of video, its density and dynamism and vibrancy and I think nothing but ‘film is dead’.… I can’t wait for the day we all ‘get over it’ and stop seeking to limit and curtail the evolution of the moving image and focus on exploiting its new properties.”

In the above image we see yet another of those evolutionary steps. Once upon a time digital was a great leap forward in filmmaking logistics. But, at long last it seems we may have come to the true calling of digital as a great leap forward in aesthetics…

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Upon raising this topic a colleague commented that with digital films “Everything’s so crisp that it sometimes feels like characters are standing in front of painted flats…”

I agree that very often the intense crispness of digital does deliver ‘painted flats’ style imagery but I dont believe this is a fault of the technology but rather directly of filmmaking practice (and ignorance) itself.

You see, we all got caught in a trap… In the 1940s Kodak developed way faster film stocks which meant cinematographer’s could close down their apertures and utilize deep focus to stage subjects in depth; something simply not possible previously. Citizen Kane stands as the pivotal example of the new deep-focus cinema that was then championed and exulted by the French New Wave critics and filmmakers, which in turn was the principle influence on American, Japanese and world cinema into the 1950’s and 60’s…

But then something happened. Video came along in the 70’s and 80’s. Small cameras, small sensors which meant innately deep depth-of-field. What this ingrained into the visual language of the 70’s and 80’s was that ‘deep focus’ equated, in the minds of viewers, to video, documentary, news reporting, veritae; and ‘shallow focus’ equated to ‘cinema’, narrative, high-art.

Thus it was that the principle concern of indie filmmakers in the 90’s and 00’s, coming out of this video mindset of the 70’s and 80’s, was how to make their use of the digital tools to get the ‘film-look’; which translated as shallow-focus.

As a result we have a whole generation of filmmakers who have been obsessed with rack-focusing rather than staging to move the viewer around the cinematic space; using the camera lens to construct space rather than a 3-diemnsion staging of space itself. The notion of Staging has become somewhat of a lost art to filmmakers and yet strangely the antithesis has happened in cinema’s great 21st century contemporary - computer gaming. Depth-of-field in 3D gaming is inherently infinite. A game designer constructs their cinematic space by designing not a ‘frame’ or a shot, or a focal-plane, but a ‘Level’ - an architectural space.

If today’s glossy sharp detail digital films seem flat and painterly like 2D digital backdrops then I would contend the cause lies not in the technology but in the lost and misunderstood art of cinema staging and deep-focus. We’ve spent so much of the digital revolution fussing over how to make digital look like film that we’ve neglected the subtle art of arranging space itself, forgotten how to focus the eye Spatially rather than the far more clumsy and overt mechanics of doing it Optically.

Here filmmakers should take a leaf out of the level-designer’s book. A good 3D game understands how to create a deep space that is focused and detailed and nuanced and textured. One need only play a game like Bioshock to see the glories of deep staging at their best.