FROM CELLULOID REALITIES TO BINARY DREAMSCAPES: CINEMA AND PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL IMMERSION

• Main Author: Lohmeyer, Edwin Lloyd McGuy
• Format: Others
• Published: UKnowledge 2012
• Subjects: Digital Cinema; Computer-Generated Imagery; Motion Capture; Digital 3D; Virtual Reality; Art and Design; Fine Arts
• Online Access: http://uknowledge.uky.edu/art_etds/2; http://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=art_etds

Technologies in digital cinema are quickly changing the way contemporary filmmakers create films and how audiences currently perceive them. As we move onward into the digital turn, it becomes ever more apparent that the medium of film has been emancipated from its dependence on the photograph. Directors are no longer required to capture the objectively real as it sits before the photographic lens, but can essentially construct it via groundbreaking advancements in computer-generated imagery, motion capture technology, and digital 3D camera systems and display technologies. Since the origins of film, spectators and filmmakers have assumed an existing relationship between reality and the photographic image. Yet digital film technologies now provide us with hyper-facsimiles of reality that are perceived as photographic, but are often created by way of computer processes. Digital cinema currently allows the viewer to inhabit and interact with cinematic realities in unprecedented ways, and it is this contemporary paradigmatic shift from the analog to the digital that has catalyzed fundamentally new ways of looking at the filmic image. In this paper, I will examine the perceptual complexities of contemporary digital film through the lens of these cinematic technologies by examining their impact on the viewer’s experience.