Loving digital for its beauty not just its practicality
For too long the distinct Colour, Grain, Artifacts, Judder and
Flicker of celluloid film had been praised and celebrated as somehow
the epitome of 'cinema'. That these defects in the celluloid image were
somehow what made cinema organic, special, magical....
As digital arrived and grew, it's potency was celebrated in terms of
Cost, Efficiency, Flexibility. For sometime now movies have been shot
digital because of practical and logistical concerns but rarely for
aesthetic ones. Subsequently the much voiced pursuit of digital camera
hardware was to achieve "the look of film, with the flexibility of
digital"...
This is a profoundly short-sighted view. Those who see Digital only
as a logistic advancement rather than an aesthetic one are failing to
see the future beyond their nose, failing to possess any vision for
what could be?
Take a long hard look at this footage from the BBC.
This incredible image sequence, that seems to present a reality more
Real than Real, a hyper-reality that is beyond what the human eye is capable of but which is
embedded with Veritae actuality, an image that is impossible in any
format but digital, was shot with a Typhoon HD4 camera in an underwater
housing.
The specs of the HD4 are remarkably humble, Not 4k, not 2k, not
even 1080 but 720p on a single CMOS sensor. However that sensor has an
astounding light sensitivity of 1000ASA and can shoot up to 1000 frames
per second.
Is there anyone who doubts that it's just a matter of a time (short
time at that) before we have such a camera capable of 2000fps at 4k??
Sometime ago I wrote a decidedly provocative piece entitled "I Love the look of Video" and in that article i observed that:
"I see chemical image of film and it just seems soft and dull and
lifeless to me. I see the razor sharpness and the infinite flexibility
of video, its density and dynamism and vibrancy and I think nothing but
'film is dead'.... I can't wait for the day we all 'get over it' and stop seeking to limit
and curtail the evolution of the moving image and focus on exploiting
its new properties."
In the above image we see yet another of those evolutionary steps. Once upon a time digital was a great leap forward in filmmaking
logistics. But, at long last it seems we may have come to the true calling of
digital as a great leap forward in aesthetics.
