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Practice as Research Portfolio 4: Understading Digital Cinematography
Video Online Oral History, Contextualising Peer Reviewed Article and other text based resource, plus online symposium and Workflow Document for Digital Cinematographic Capture and Display.
Coming out of my long time documentary experience is a thrust towards various series of interviews with different people within specific themes with no editing involved. I'm convinced that the idea that all of those things that disappear from the rushes because of editing and the need to be 'professional' are the very things that are valuable with regard to future researchers looking back into the material. It is the pauses and the dilemmas, body language, un-comfortableness, laughter with the interviewer that will produce extra meaning with regard to the subject under investigation, from the position of hindsight. This style of interviewing produces a different rhythm in the interview itself. Whereas a clip might not go beyond 30 seconds because the audience is thought to tire, in these interviews the norm is 15, if not 30 minutes - and through this duration a different level of interest can arise. Because of this I have begun a new still-yet-moving-image-portraits series with attendant interviews - all of which are unedited. In the past I have been researching the oral history around Digital Cinematography, plus I have been involved with a European project that looked into the memory of a previous generation around the issue of the war as seen from inhabitants of different countries within the conflict - these interviews went one stage further and in fact after the first question, did not then interrogate the subject further. There was preparation with the subject, but from then on the subject was allowed to just remember.
• Click anywhere in this sentence for access to the 12 of the 60 interviews in the European Memory Project.
• Click anywhere in this sentence for access to 16 interviews in the Oral History of Somerset Working People
• Click anywhere in this sentence for access to 20 interviews on the subject of Digital Cinematography
The Verbatim History of Digital Cinematography is currently comprised of over 25 people significant in the inception of digital cinematography who discuss the effect of emerging digital moving Image capabilities and what their effect might have on the audience. These involve the development of Higher Frame Rates, Higher Resolution and Higher Dynamic Range. There are interviews with prominent academics, people who are involved in the design of the new capture and display media, artists and professionals working in the new medium. http://www.visualfields.co.uk/indexHDresource.htm
There are a set of online resources comprising various reference works:
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/KT2.htm
There is a summation of relevant issues in Digital Cinematography produced for Watershed Media Center and Creative England, on the subject of Digital Workflows for academics and students of cinematography alike: http://www.visualfields.co.uk/DIGITALWORKFLOWS.pdf
There is an 80,000 word blog updated regularly and maintained to keep abreast of this ever changing subject area, ‘High Definition and High Resolution Motion Imaging’: http://highdefinition-nomercy.blogspot.co.uk/
There is a recording of a symposium held to try to integrate both professional and academic understanding within the subject area. This took place in April 2011 and was entitled: The Look from Capture to Display. This can be found at the following URL where there is around 5 hours online footage of the subject:
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/KTThelook.htm
There is a peer-reviewed article published in the subject area:
‘The Practice of Knowledge Exchange’, to be published early Autumn, 2013, JMP, Intellect 10,600 words. http://www.visualfields.co.uk/thepractice.pdf
At the beginning of my 2007 AHRC Creative Research Fellowship I formulated a 36 month Schedule to investigate my core research question:
‘In what ways will High Resolution Imaging change the work produced in the convergence of art and visual technologies and consequently, our experience of that work?’
I had realised that between 1895 and 1915 it was not considered an imperative that the voices of early film practitioners were recorded for posterity (in text or any other form). In the current period, mirroring the development of film but 100 years later, I decided that I would in fact record the voices of the pioneers of High Definition, or more precisely, Digital Cinematography, so that researchers could look back and hear those voices speaking in the idiom of this study and the culture of the time. To allow proper access to the resources I shot interviews with neither camera movement nor editing, so that future researchers can access the raw data and also pay attention to both what is said and not said in the silences so that the cultural attitudes of the time may reveal our attitude to our subject. There are currently some 14 hours of interviews with this as it is an ongoing resource where more will be added.
To complete this portfolio I wrote a definitive contextualising article laying out the issues which face researchers. Professional expertise derived from developing and higher resolution technologies now challenges academic convention by seeking to re-inscribe digital image making as a material process. In this article I identify key subject areas to enable an inquiry into those aesthetics that might derive from the technical imperatives within the medium. I then proceed to look at the consequent artistic and cultural implications and conclude by challenging the current academic position of the digital as being inherently immaterial. In this I state that readers should also become listeners and viewers and access the Verbatim History to underpin the points made in the article:
Convergence, Sage, June 2011, Pages 113 - 123
and Conference: Westminster Spring 2012, The Academics Mind, The Cinematographers Eye and The Artists Intuition
In its totality, this PARP is in effect an early form of electronic book.
NB - if a reference is made to an artefact or exhibition in the article, most of my work can be found at: http://www.flaxton.btinternet.co.uk/history0.htm
The article, 'HD Aesthetics', can be found here: http://bristol.academia.edu/TerryFlaxton/Papers/505150/HD_Aesthetics
The Verbatim History can be found here: http://www.visualfields.co.uk/indexHDresource.htm
The list of interviews can be found here: http://www.visualfields.co.uk/KTV.htm
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This is not a complete but an open ended process. Its ramifications feed through to other PARP’s plus other initiatives that I am now working on for future research. Though presented in a linear fashion, the research work is in fact a continuum of behavior which is intended to lead toward answering my core research question so the emerging and developing ideas for calibrating exposure of future work for higher immersion and impact were further discussed in the following Internet Publications:
136176 'High Definitintion and High Resolution Motion Imaging', Blog 75,000 words, http://highdefinition-nomercy.blogspot.com/
136179 'Understanding Digital Cinematography', Online resource around 75,000 words
& I further refined my thinking and presented more emerging ideas in the following invited talks to Research Communities: 'Myth and Meaning in the Digital Age', Invited paper to research community ETH Zurich, 2010. 'High Definition Technologies and Aesthetics', Bergen Institute of Fine Art (Invited Paper to Research Community), 2009.
TERRY FLAXTON
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