Great insight, APE.
So I think you've basically pointed out that the transition from analogue to digital was a pretty significant change. And yet, being humans, wanting continuity for psychological reasons, or whatever, we have almost seamlessly adopted digital has though nothing much has been altered.
(Not that it hasn't been/isn't a disruptive technology.)
And why not? For the audience, there's hardly any difference whether the acquisition method was analogue or digital, or whether they're watching actual film being projected onto the big screen, or a digital image.
And yet the business of movie making and movie enjoying marches on...with largely the same terminology and the rest.
I like that.
And come to think of it, is the transition from analogue to digital in some ways actually less stark or game-changing than moving from silent films to talkies, for example? We may point out that such-and-such film was shot on film and such-and-such and such film was captured digitally. But no one really speaks of "filmies" or digies", for instance. It's still the movies.
Great point, Josh.
I think so too. I mean, if you're going to make a movie, wouldn't it be nice if it's so good that it's still enjoyed one-hundred years from now and considered a classic? You bet. On the other hand, I think it's perfectly cool and by far more important that it's entertaining and meaningful to you and your audience
today, right now. Why worry about your immortality. As it stands now, as far as I know, there's no such thing, really.
And come to think of it, I doubt your investors or the studio cares how it will play in the twenty-second century. They want their returns and profit now.
Besides, maybe the people of one-hundred or five-thousand years from now will be nothing but a bunch of a-holes who wouldn't know a good film from
Jersey Shore.
Or maybe they'll believe that film is a sin, and they'll burn every copy they can get their hands on. "Film" will cease to exist.
Who knows?
I was daydreaming at work today about what form movies could take in the future. (I like how James calls them "motion pictures." That might be a good alternative to calling them "film" or "video.")
What if we take the concepts of recording peoples' experiences from the films
Brainstorm,
Strange Days, or linking into their brains like in
The Matrix or
Total Recall?
But, of course instead of just playing back experiences or putting the audience into a virtual world, we want to plug stories, narratives, feature "films" into peoples' minds/brains.
Imagine how that might work. So, maybe such films would still be shot in largely the same way they are now. And maybe at the same, or in addition to, they'd be shot largely in the minds of the filmmakers.
You'd probably still hire actors, for example. You'd still make sets. Find locations. Costumes. Art direction. Lots of the same stuff that happens now.
On the other hand, the filmmaker might be able to literally imagine the whole movie, or at least parts of it.
The filmmaker might be able to pull things from her memory and incorporate it. If need be, the filmmakers might have to go out and capture experience, visuals, aurals (If I'm making that word up, I'm okay with that.), feelings, incidents, etc. In fact, just like today, they'd probably have to do a lot of staging of events and incidents according to the screenplay/story...maybe even just as much.
You could rely on the audience's own imagination and mental repertoire to fill in special effects. In that way it would be almost like the "telepathic" relationship between a writer's narrative and his readers. Think of all the money saved there; your audience's own imagination and mental power would fill in the SFX and whatever else for you.
On the other hand, I suspect you might still spend a lot of time and money creating those SFX much as they are now so that your audience would see
just what you'd want them to see, or to ensure quality and consistency of product, just as is required in food manufacturing, for example, today, etc.
Acquisition, the camera, I suppose, would be something that records the filmmakers' brain waves, physiological responses, mental processes etc. I'm guessing it would also incorporate conventional, or more conventional video acquisition, compositing, all that stuff.
We're still talking about narrative film, or feature "film," here, or motion picture
and experience. So we're not talking about making a virtual world and setting the audience free in it. We want to tell a story. The audience member is still "stuck" with the story we're telling. They're still largely an observer. This is how the tradition of telling a story, as we're familiar with it, survives these technological developments. That is, a storyteller still
tells a story [shows, really, since we're talking about film], and a listener still
receives [experiences] it.
An alternative might be the
Total Recall/The Matrix version, in which the subject enters a virtual world more like a video game. But let's stick with movies, here, in which the art of telling and receiving a story is maintained.
Again. The production of such a film would, I should think, still be much as it is today. There would still be much of the usual crew --for major productions at least.
(Young Billy, or an ambitious I.T.er, if and when such technology became readily available to consumers, could concoct such a "mental film" in his bedroom all on his lonesome, at least theoretically.)
There might still be art directors, set designers, production designers, wardrobe, etc etc...much of the whole shebang.
And of course there would still be editing. They will use NLEs of some sort. But it will probably be much more interesting, and much more complicated, than today's. The editor will be working with a mixture, I'd bet, of recorded brain waves, video, SFX, you name it.
And I suppose on the end user side you're talking about hooking the audience's brain up to a playback device --much like in those movies mentioned above.
Think of the possibilities. You might literally make your audience feel fear at the appropriate moment. Give them goose bumps. Trigger arousal. The list of drama-enhancing possibilities seems long. Okay, I suppose one-hundred years from now such things might be considered too invasive, just as they probably would be today. And maybe that would be too much like interacting with a virtual world (à la
The Matrix,
Total Recall).
Then you might need a doctor's okay to watch. Or maybe there will be a sort of "mute or volume level button" for the more intense inputs, so more frail "viewers" could watch without inducing a heart attack, or whatever.
There might be a special Academy Award for technological innovations in autonomic nervous system manipulation, for example.
Think of how the acquisition of such material might happen, first of all, and then how it would be worked with in the editing room.
Anyway.
