From: Sam Wells (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Jul 04 2006 - 11:04:32 PDT
>
> my personal confession - showing my own conservative 'holding on
> to the past' bent - i have to confess to finding the use of the
> word 'digital' as opposed to 'video' strange - a way of cleaning up/
> elevating the status of a medium. tube/chip/analog/digital/various
> formats/sizes - none of these seem like huge name-changing shifts
> to me. i first noticed the change of word from filmmakers who in
> the past swore they would never pick up a video camera - i thought
> using the word 'digital' took the bite out of shooting with a
> panasonic or sony....
True enough Shelly, and a good point, I noticed the same thing.
Elitism I dunno, I think it depends on where you're situated. The
first generation of filmmakers I encountered using DV were pretty
chatty about breaking the back of Hwood elitism but it quickly
emerged that most of them were banking - or perhaps 'anti-banking' on
those VX1000s to facilitate their transformation into Spielberg II
I mean I've been told for 10 years now that in shooting 16mm I'm
shooting on a dead format.
From my perspective, elitist, something-centric (but I can't even
*define* that something easily, labeling issues notwithstanding) the
past history of 'video' isn't that interesting in light of where I
think "digital" might go.
I actually think film's history provides better analogies - for me
this is not so much 2006 as something between 1896 and 1906 in
comparable terms of evolution; I think of my G5 and FCP as a kind of
Praxinoscope in relation to where I'd like this to go. And, no doubt
elitist again (fine with me) I DO think of it as a step backward in
that sense, but am willing to gamble - and gamble quite a bit, the
myth that 'digital' is cheaper is just that, no matter how many
economies of scale (desktop PC's, cheap software etc) one can
leverage...
And the potential to have a device that is "optical printer" AND
projection engine at the same time is too interesting for me to ignore
(In a certain sense the cost of film reflects a maturity of classical
manufacturing, it doesn't outsource so easily it seems, China-made
isn't as appealing to Kodak as it is to Apple or LaCie) and anyway
it's cheaper to copy things than to make them, which is aesthetically
not unacceptable to me; the iterative possibilities of digital
construction is in fact at the center of it's appeal to me) but you
have to have something to copy; and this is, currently - for most
purposes of this discussion I think, photochemical film.....
.....One can arguably influence one's descendants, but can never
choose ancestors...
As for disruptive, I could make the case that the structural
disruption of classical film moving pictures has less to do with
Napster or DVD's - which are only distribution models - but, and
certainly in the mass audience, reception sense and much more to do
with gaming...
..which is becoming interesting to me not because of the games per se
(I've never been any kind of game player) but because of the
potential of loop structures therein...
I guess I'm just not needing to look too closely at a specific 1980's
to the present time slice of 'disruptions' and am more interested in
what seeds are in the garden......
-Sam
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