Mike Jones Digital Basin
screen media rinse cycle

Holistic Thinking Integrated Making

A Thirteen-point manifesto for educating creators of cinema and the institutions that teach them.

[After three scrappy attempts to collate these ideas here lies the final Manifesto]



The paradigms have shifted. The great wheels of perspective and process have turned and re-aligned themselves. They haven't done it alone. The cogs have moved with the binaural pressure of technology and expectation. The technology has given media makers new ways to create and new means to deliver. On their own these might not be enough to shift the paradigm of understanding and conceptualization over but with new means of creation and new channels of delivery comes new and evolved expectations of the viewer. An audience that has an increasingly sophisticated visuality and an ever broadening complex of psychological tools for comprehension.

And here the great turning of the wheels grind and shudder, for whilst the tools have evolved, and the viewer has evolved in their expectations of what the tools can make; the conceptual underpinnings of the institutions of cinematic teaching have not. The hierarchical, segmented, linear, sequential and stratified paradigms of cinematic assembly and comprehension still form the spine of teaching and learning about cinematic making ? embodied into the bedrock of the institutions seemingly unshakable and unquestioned.

But, to persist with these engrained modes is inherently problematic and walks the path of failing the media makers of the future. There is no doubt that, in spite of these inflexible short-sighted pedagogical approaches at odds with the direction of cinema, media makers will always find their way forward into new cinematic possibilities driven by technologically. But what the future of media production requires is not more creators who know how to wield the tools but more creators who can wield the tools with an intellectual and conceptual deftness that prevents a diminishing of technology to its lowest, common, cinematic denominator.

Give any young person a software video editing system and their first product will invariably be a pastiche of every video effect, transition and digital hyperbole the system can offer. This is not just immaturity but rather a natural process that must be embraced. One must 'get it out of their system' before they can embrace a more sophisticated mode and process. Before they can wield the tool with finesse and greater emotional dexterity they must first feel its weight and wield it in earnest clumsiness.

But whilst the institutions that provide the foundation for shaping new media makers continue to be built from traditional and antiquated production and theoretical structures - structures fundamentally at odds with contemporary and evolving expectations and sensibilities - we in effect, create cinematic practitioners that leave their education and enter into creative lives still having not had the chance to get the digital hyperbole 'out of their system'. A generation of immature cinematic creators still dazzled by the power of the digital rather than intellectually and tangibly skilled in manipulating and shaping the digital into more meaningful forms.

In this light I present a thirteen-point manifesto for repositioning the education of creators of cinema and the institutions that teach them. Thirteen key areas that all media makers of the future must conceptually comprehend and tangibly be able to wield. Thirteen key areas that all students should be versed in and knowledgeable of. Not in substitution of established cinematic concepts but in compliment to them - The layer doesn't supplant the sequence; it enhances it. The composited image doesn't dilute the cut it expands its context. The animated doesn't overtake the power of the still. The virtual doesn't discount the real, it emphasises and questions it.

Here then I propose 13 elements, perspectives, cocnepts and approaches for building better cinematic artists of the future.

1. Composing Space.
The over-arching super-structure of cinematic making in the 21st century is not the Frame but the Space. Never has the cinematic frame been more varied, more unpredictable or more scalable and so its power as a central pillar of understanding and making cinema is rendered dysfunctional and limited. Instead the common structure of making and understanding cinema is found in the Space ? the composition, navigation, arrangement, exploration and design of Space itself. From the huge screen to the tiny screen, from home-theatre to mobile theatre, from gaming to interactive forms to all the manifestations of the Moving Image it is an understanding of how space is evoked to build meaning that is central to them all.

All media makers of the future need firm footholds in spatial concepts as much as traditional framic compositional ones. It is Architecture, Landscaping and Modelling that are the core of media making in the 21st century as much as light, frame and mise en scene.


2. 3D Graphics and the Virtual Camera
Live action is an Option, not a default. No media maker in the 21st century should be without the fundamental knowledge of how to produce, stage, compose and 'shoot' in 3D virtual environments. A movie maker who doesn't posses this knowledge is like a movie maker who doesn't know about the Rule of Thirds.

Beyond just technology the Virtual Camera presents entirely new aesthetic sensibilities and direct challenges to the mise en scene and so the implications of media-making in this form are massive in scope. The future will pose a landscape where virtual cameras are commonplace moving image acquisition mechanism and we need to be teaching new media makers now the visual language sophistication to explore with this tool.

All media makers should feel as comfortable steering and 'shooting' with a Virtual Camera in a computer generated environment as they do with a physical camera in a live-action environment.


3. Compositing and Composing in Layers
Since its birth film-making has been a craft of assembly and the principal mode of that assembly was the sequence: the ordered placement and arrangement of discreet shots to construct meaning - the montage.

But a new dimension has been added; the vertically layered montage. Certainly there have been sporadic and significant dalliances with this mode in the past but rather than a fringe form the construction of cinematic meaning in layers - blended, composited, masked, superimposed and multi-framed layers - is now mainstream visual language with a density of visual information in tune with the demands of an evolved multi-tasking, visually literate and articulate audience.

Any contemporary cinematic education that does not invest equal time in examining and producing layered montage as it does in drilling students on Russian montage is quite simply doing its students a grave disservice and hobbling their ability engage with one of the central pillars of contemporary cinema.


4. Multi-platform, scalable delivery without hierarchy.
For far too long cinematic educators, distributors, broadcasters and media-makers themselves have institutionalized a hierarchy of privilege in regard to the delivery of cinematic content - the cinema theatrical release at the top and a pyramidal chain down from there. This has drilled into being an absurd concept that the ultimate destination is projected large screen cinema and everything else is second rate. This maddening perspective ingrains compositional aesthetic choices around one mode despite the fact that the work itself may, and invariably will, ultimately be seen in many modes.

This hierarchy of perception and privilege is dying and must die and indeed is arguably dead already and the cinematic world will be a better place as a result. The future is Multi-platfom delivery across an unprecedented diversity of delivery platforms - large and small. Thus we need to be instilling in the new generation of media makers the compositional, aesthetic and technical sophistication to be able to create moving image media that engages and exploits this environment and these opportunities rather than ignore or rally against them in an irrelevant air of quality perception. The future is not High Definition, the future is All Definition, where all frame sizes are equally acceptable and viable for both acquisition and delivery in concert with their contexts.

Any institution that is not teaching the technical creation of media to mobile phones side by side with how to produce master prints for theatrical projection is cheating their students. Any institution that is not teaching web-based streaming media along side television broadcast formats is fundamentally failing their students.


5. Ownership of an End to End process.
Traditionally the media creation industry, in all  its manifestations, was constructed around discreet  knowledge sets. Editor, sound recordist, cinematographer, line producer, script editor and so on...

But those days are gone. No role in the production of cinematic form functions or should be allowed to function, in isolation any more. Specialist skills are useful and desirable but any blinkered and restricted knowledge base is creative suicide and irresponsibly restrictive. There is no cinematographer on the planet who isn't a better cinematographer for having an informed understanding of editing. There is no editor on the planet who isn't a better editor for having experience of script development and writing. And there is certainly no director on the planet who isn't a better director if they know how to shoot, edit, write and produce.

Cinematic education for cinema makers in the 21st century needs to be built around self-sufficient empowerment; an ownership of the process from end to end ? from concept to scheduling, from storyboard to distribution. Creative vision served by technical and pragmatic process. A director should know how to do their own budgets. An editor should be able to construct a storyboard. A cinematographer should be able to edit a sequence. A producer should know how to white-balance a camera. And ALL should know how to technically deliver their work in any number of formats.

This is the difference between Educating a student to be a Movie-Maker and simply Training someone to be a Movie-Facilitator.


6. Software Agnosticism and the Philosophy of the Tools
One of the great tragedies of media making education over the past decade has been the supplanting of real knowledge, skills and core competencies with software specific, brand allied pseudo-skills. An editor, skilled and knowledgeable in the craft, technology and artistry of editing as a process, should be more than capable of sitting down in front of any editing system, any editing tool, and be able to produce functional quality work. A carpenter is not rendered useless by changing to a different type of circular saw..!

Sadly however we are in an era where instead of demanding this universality as a bench mark from creative artisans we accept the corporate-driven brand allegiance of software specific skills. Software and technology Users rather than real technical creators.

Any institution that teaches software specific functions above, or worse, in place of core processes is fundamentally dis-empowering their students and directly damaging the broader creative industry, making it slavishly adherent to corporate marketing directions rather than the needs and skill demands of production.

Furthermore, any cinematic education that provides only one type, one brand, one form of tool or system of production in exclusivity rather than providing options and diversity of tools to students - so that they might find the right tool that suits them and their internal methodology of working - is detrimentally hobbling those students. These students are rendered under-skilled servants of a software company rather than comprehensively skilled artists and craftspersons with abilities beyond the tools.

Each and every software tool for creative cinematic production carries with it an internally logical philosophy ? a conceptual mode of perceiving the creative production process instilled on inception into the tool by those who made it and the direct imperatives of the corporation for which it was made. Thus a creative media maker in choosing a particular tool for production is by default 'buying into' a tacit, if not proactive, acceptance of that tool's philosophical approach. Their work with that tool is subsequently governed, influenced and shaped by that philosophy.

If however the student through their cinematic education is restrictively indoctrinated into a particular tool (and its respective philosophy), without wider consideration of a personal creative and philosophical approach, then their work will be dictatorially shaped by the tool itself rather than by their own creative imperatives. The tool will dictate what can and cant be done and how it will be done rather than the creator seeking out these pathways to suit themselves and the needs of the project.

Whilst standard technical formats provide functional benchmarks and uniformity, the idea that there are Industry Standard creative tools is fundamentally abhorrent. There is NO SUCH THING AS AN 'INDUSTRY STANDARD' creative tool. The very concept is anti-creative. It is a prescribing that there is only one way to work and that other techno-creative approaches are of lesser value or unacceptable. It implies that a work is only acceptable if made with a particular type of technology  and this is absurdly destructive and the very concept must be done away. We must ensure cinematic producers are not conforming creative vision to needs of the tool but seeking the tool to extol the creative needs of the production.

The only true measure of intelligence and knowledge is the ability to learn, acquire and apply new skills and knowledge. Thus an 'editor' whose comprehension of editing process, technique and technology has been built solely through the confined prism of one particular tool's presented philosophical paradigm is fundamentally weak; dis-empowered and at the mercy the ever changing whims of software developers rather than a servant of the creative process where by the tools are means to an ends.


7. Multi-channel and Spatial sound
Sound has long been the forgotten and neglected cinematic art and sadly there are still too many institutions that treat sound as a subsidiary process. But beyond this simple issue there is also a bigger picture that is neglected even by those schools that do embrace sound as of equal significance to cinematic form as image - surround, multi-channel and spatial sound.

When we live in an age where TV commercials are mixed in surround sound, the home TV system has surround sound and even mobile devices can produce multi-channel sound the standard paradigm for how we consider, study, teach and produce sound for the moving image is concertedly altered. But whilst all institutions would no doubt spend substantial periods of time discussing musical scores, diegetic and non-diegetic sound insertions and the effect of mixing on dramatic tension; the examination of the aural placement in space, the aesthetics of immersive sound and the effect surround spatial sound has on how we shoot and edit is almost non-existent.

Any cinematic education that does not treat spatial sound, both in terms of production and theory, as the benchmark for sound in the digital age is living in the past. Any education that does not force students to produce surround sound movies and explore the impact on viewers of spatial arrangement is simply Not teaching contemporary film making. Not teaching, exploring, understanding, producing and articulating surround sound as a core component is like training a car mechanic but never mentioning electronic fuel injection or hybird electric engines...!


8. Integrated Screen Studies.
The implementation of Screen Studies, of theoretical, historical and cultural analysis of cinematic form, is obviously part and parcel of understanding cinema. However far too often the teaching of screen studies within institutions is polarised in extremes. A token gesture of shallow overview diminished as of secondary importance to the making of cinematic form itself. Or dense cultural, psychological and social analysis largely divorced from the making and experience of cinema itself.  The fundamental and shared issue across these is a enforced division between 'making' and 'thinking', between 'creating' and 'comprehending'.

The ideal that should be emphatically embraced by all cinematic education institutions, and indeed all media makers, is the marriage of the two. Creative production informed by theoretical rigour, conceptual theory underpinned with grounded practical and technical knowledge. Theory cannot exist in a vacuum and production cannot pioneer without concept.

The teaching of integrated screen studies is imperative to create a generation of media makers who are not at the mercy of either technology or history. Media makers that understand where we have come from and are willing and able to speculate on where we are going to? Integrated screen studies should be taught in simultaneous, unifying concert with production where every technical and creative step is articulated by a functional and informed concept. This allows for media makers who comprehend the broader implications of how they move the camera, how they construct the drama, how they build the visual and the end result is simply and plainly Better Movies.


9. Working with Obstructions -  Lo-Fi, High-Concept
The making of all forms of cinema can be boiled down to a singular idea ? logical problem solving. At any budget, on any level, in any format, the process of constructing cinematic form is a process of solving creative and technical problems. In this context the key to educating dynamic, functional, progressively thinking media makers, who are capable of an end-to-end construction of cinema, is simply to build their skills via tangible obstructions.

Students should be taught to make movies with less. To make movies with distinct and clearly defined obstructions. If a student can make a movie on a mobile phone camera then they can make a movie on any format. If they can edit meaning from desperate unrelated elements they'll be ready to understand the cinema effect. Only if they can coherently explore big ideas with minimal equipment will they be ready to make bigger movies with larger resources. If a student can find cheap, accessible, available solutions to produce conceptually complex moving images then you will have a mindset for problem solving that is at the heart of all cinema on any budget.

An institution should be constructing and enforcing an environment of make-shift exploration for this is breeding ground of true innovation. Students should be consistently encouraged and placed into environments that demand a process of working Lo-Fi but High-Concept as this builds self-sufficiency, pragmatism, un-wasteful production efficiency and critical thinking that empowers all cinema.


11. Embracing the Personal
Whilst the forms in which the moving image might manifest can vary enormously ? from feature film to advertising, from abstract video art to gritty documentary ? all good cinema cannot escape the the personal and the human. Only once a media maker can make a movie about themselves and explore the very personal perspective of individual experience will they we be ready to tell the stories of others and engage with moving images that have tangible effect  on the viewer.

Making personal stories and working with others to collaboratively tell those stories, moreover sharing ownership over those stories, is at the core of the journey to being a cinematic media maker. Knowledge is to be shared as readily as stories and without the 'personal' all stories are meaningless. If you can make an intimate, personal film examining yourself, your life, your thoughts and passions then you'll be ready to explore the qualities in others. All film students should have to make a personal film about themselves before turning the camera on others.


12. The perpetual motion machine of Collaborative Learning.
Each student is a teacher. Each student will, by design or accident, pass on information to their fellow students and that flow of knowledge, acquired, processed and dispensed, is the powerful education vehicle available to an education institution.

Show enough of a set of skills to prompt all students forward to ask their own questions on where they want to go to next. When they ask, show these students what they need to get to where they wish to go within the specific context of the creative needs. In a very short time every member of a class body will know one or two things that most of the rest of the class do not related to where they wanted to take their creation. Before too long the class is a perpetual motion machine as students begin to teach other and the Teacher them self becomes a guide to good practice and bigger thinking whilst the students embrace a true and deeper level of 'ownership' of their creative process and their own skills.


13. The Teacher is the facilitator of learning NOT the dispenser of knowledge.
All educators within an institution for teaching cinema must let go of the idea that they are the 'authority' and custodian of knowledge. The very notion of a singular bastion of information, a singular point of access is fundamentally flawed and inhibits real pedagogical growth.

Every year that passes creates a more informed and skilled generation of media makers before they even step foot into an education institution. This knowledge is un-shaped, ill-informed, sporadic and disjointed certainly but to rally against it is pointless. The teacher must embrace and welcome the skills and knowledge the students already have into the classroom as the fuel for greater learning. To shape, direct, consolidate and expand that knowledge, and that unavoidable visual literacy sophistication, rather than attempt to dispel it. The teacher is the facilitator of a learning process not there to shape it, not dispense it. There to make it meaningful but not dictate it.

Posted at 12:00AM Jun 18, 2007 by Mike Jones in media education  |  Comments[3]