Digital Visual Effects
Plato’s philosophical musings in the allegory of the Cave, Republic, imparts a teaching that from an understanding of form arises a better understanding of sense perceptions. In our modern age images bombard: televisions flicker, flash and fade into our periphery and ads proliferate across billboards and in magazines. Imagine now the prisoners of Plato’s Cave, where humans sat, their torsos fettered and fixed, able to see only what’s in front of them as puppeteers project shadows of objects made of every material onto the cave wall. The prisoners scope of the world narrowed to monochromatic, two dimensional shadows. Digital Visual Effects (DVFx) are similar to Plato’s Cave, since they enhance our perception of a given story.
Digital Storytelling: McClean
Computer graphics emerged from scientific studies in the 1940s and 1950s, when computers were used to drive mechanical means of producing graphic images. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several short films using computer-assisted-art techniques were gained recognition. However, it was not until Tron (1982, Lisberger) that computer graphics were a main component of a movie. Frank Foster's documentary The Sotry of Computer Graphics (1999), Richard Taylor, one of the CG team members involved with Tron, observes that " if (a film) doesn't grab you by the heart, it doesn't matter technically how it looks. In the end, a film is a sotyr and... the density of visuals in films or the look of the film doesn't guarantee success at all.
For instance, in the film Fight Club (1999, Fincher) the viewer is taken through a forest of neurons, as dendrites fire electrical currents, traveling through the amygdala, the fear center of the brain, and passing through various outer layers, the surface of the brain, layers of skull, then skin and a hair follicle and out to the barrel of a gun. These DVFx give the viewer a perspective of the story that would normally be left out and not until the film is over do we understand the meaning behind this 95-second shot: that the scenes and story we are about to see takes place mainly inside the nameless narrator's, Edward Norton's, mind. Such perspectives, similar to the invention of the microscope or telescope give allots us insight into the subatomic or cosmic worlds, allowing us to better understand a story, film, our sense perceptions and ultimately our daily interactions.
I will explore the use of digital effects in film and how they accentuate storytelling, starting with an overview of photography: On Photography by Susan Sontag, looking at the development of timelapse images through Edward Muybridge and photographs by Dianne Arbus, which highlight the odd and unusual, 'the freaks' during a time of cookie cutter homes and families, illustrating that another world exists. Then I will explore films like Citizen Kane, Tron, Star Wars, Fight Club, etc. and how the use of digital effects enhance and progress the storyline.
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