Mike Jones Digital Basin
cinematic media rinse cycle

Earthsim, the Virtual Camera and the feeling of flying.

We don't see the world any more as we once did...

Earthsim takes the GoogleEarth concept and drags it from what is effectively a glorified map into a complete virtual earth simulation. From the macro-level of the solar system and all the planets, down to the personal and intimate encounter at human-size on the micro-level; Earthsim is a wildly ambitious and visually glorious construction. Just as a child's first encounter with an atlas re-shapes their thinking of the world forever so to does Earthsim promise to fold the conceptual paradigm of how we see our planet.



But there's something else at play here, a distinct embodiment of new visual languages.

A simulation such as Earthsim may be many things to many perspectives but at its core Earthsim is Cinema. Without the cinematic, without the art of the moving image, Earthsim is a series of maps and images. Though presented digitally and electronically the language constructs by which we view maps and images are fundamentally different to those communicative tenets by which we experience (rather than view) the moving image.

What is driving this cinematic language - distinct and new from traditional cinema's Mise en scene frame and Montage sequence of frames - is the same language element that is at the heart of so many  contemporary cinematic forms, the virtual camera.

The shared element of Gaming, Motion Graphics, 3D animation and Compositing is the Virtual Camera – the non-physical vanishing point in space that is the node of resolution from which a viewer experiences the cinematic scene. In live action the mechanical camera apparatus provides this vanishing point for the viewer. But by its physical nature invariably possessed profoundly physical constraints and a tangible awareness of its spatial occupation. The camera couldn't go through walls, couldn't move in infinite directions.



But the virtual camera is non-physical and its spatial occupation infinite. It is the vanishing point of the cinematic space – the point at which perspective converges. All genres of Gaming have utilized the virtual camera in various forms – from Wonderboy-like Side-Scrollers, to the Doom derived First person Shooter, to the God-View cameras of Total War and The Sims. So to do all forms of Motion Graphics find their common aesthetic platform in the virtual camera via a layered compositional space of multiple and blended perspectives coexisting in a hybrid environment. So to 3D animation and the 3D virtual environment where composition is cartesian; an array of X, Y and Z space with the experience of watching a deliberate composition of the viewer into the architecture; their 'eyes' composed into the space.

The virtual camera is the maypole around which a maelstrom of media hybridity dances and its impact on cinematic language is both subtle and profound. The 20th century was imbued with a language of the cut; the construction of meaning by the sequence of seeing. To construct a 'story' (in the most broad use of the term) we jumped in progressive succession from image-island to image-island forming cinematic land-bridges as we went to make sense of the journey. But in the 21st century we no longer bother with the staccato of the CUT, rather we invoke the infinite positioning of the virtual camera to fly our perspective in infinite and continual progressions along a continuum rather than an archipelago.

We no longer CUT-TO we MOVE-TO.

Hence we come back to Earthsim (and indeed Google Earth to some extent) which is much more than a Digital-Globe or Hybrid-Documentary Atlas. Earthsim employs, as its key mechanism of experience; the experiential paradigm of its engagement,  the Virtual Camera. And in so doing becomes a work of pure contemporary cinema employing not the language of the word or the text or the image but of the cinematic.

If the sole desired outcome of Google Earth was to present an on-line global map system then the act of double clicking a point on the globe would JUMP-CUT you to that position. If the sole aim of Earthsim was to provide an interface to view documentary information about the Earth then selecting a topic or environment would be the electronic version of turning a 'page', a jump to the selected viewing. But neither Earthsim or Google Earth function this way; rather they both employ a continuum of perspective whereby both tools Fly the viewer to the destination with the visual, and indeed visceral, journey between the point of selection and the point of arrival is the experience.

Marshall McLuhan strikes again as once more we are reminded that the “Medium is the Message” with the Virtual Camera quickly becoming the consistent cinematic occupant by which to understand the aesthetics of these new mediums.

>

VANISHING POINT: SPATIAL COMPOSITION & THE VIRTUAL CAMERA -
Seminar presentation at the University of NSW school of media theatre and film looking the construction and perception of the virtual camera in gaming and cinema and its impact on cinematic spatiality. Presented here as a two-part Podcast.
Part1
Part2

Posted at 12:00AM Dec 04, 2007 by Mike Jones in moving image theory  |  Comments[1]