Critical Commentary on Portfolio Four: Understanding Digital Cinematography
This portfolio includes a series of resources produced for academics and industry practitioners to enable a greater understanding of the ever-changing and fast-developing field of Digital Cinematography.
In conceiving this set of resources I had realised that at the birth of photochemical cinematography, 100 years before the inception of new digital media, no verbatim reports had been captured due to the lack of recording technology at the time. 100 years later at the birth of Digital Cinematography we had the technology and all of its affordances that would also allow the generation of new knowledge in the act of capture itself. The Verbatim History of Digital Cinematography originated from this context so there are interviews with people involved in the design of the new capture and display media, artists, academics and professionals working in the new medium discussing the effect on the audience and themselves of the new medium.
This then developed into this separate portfolio, Understanding Digital Cinematography, within which there are a series text-based online resources, downloadable pdfs with information for practitioners and academics, articles, conference presentations, notes on digital workflows authored by myself and commissioned by Creative England in association with the Watershed Media Centre, talks to research communities, recorded symposia, plus documentation of lighting and HDR research demonstrations. Ethical clearance was obtained and best practice applied in the gathering of interviews.
To jump-start the dissemination of my developing grasp of the key issues of Digital Cinematography, I joined together with Dr Richard Misek to instigate a symposium entitled The Look from Capture to Display. This was to become an important beginning for a strand of research where I was to pair academics with industry professionals to begin to translate their different jargon for a general audience. My intention at the time was simply to try to demystify the movement of film and video footage through the digital production process from camera to exhibition. Much later, after my AHRC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship, this was to lead to the idea of an Immersive Learning Environment (informed by the Camera and Lens Tests I was to set up at UWE) where people from the same discipline could generate a kind of working lingua franca to translate what each was saying to the other from their differing perspectives. (An example of this would be a signal processing engineer trying to share ideas with a trainee camera assistant. Although each comes from the same discipline they would need to work towards an understanding of their different process-specific jargons or argot).
Previously, the ‘look’ of a film was the domain of the cinematographer, yet as a result of the various new forms of image manipulation that had appeared in the last decade and a half, new types of collaboration had resulted – for example, between cinematographers, post-production supervisors, visual effects artists, and colourists. Given the multiplicity of ways in which the aesthetics of a film can be changed after shooting is complete, and people in the role other than cinematographer could affect the look of a film, a key question presented itself: who then controls what aspects of a film’s look? To begin to answer this, I and Dr Richard Misek formulated a symposium to explore the answer.
This symposium traced how the ‘look’ of a shot changes at each stage of this process, explained some of the technologies that effect these changes, and discussed the decision-making behind these changes with experts and interested parties – stakeholders – from different sections of research encompassing both academia and industry. This in effect was to set the tone for the rest of the research period. This symposium also explored the reorganisation of production roles and responsibilities that had resulted from the digitisation of film-making workflows.
The symposium drew from a range of specialisms, bridging theory and practice. Invited speakers included: Cinematographer Ben Smithard (The Damned United, Cranford, Spooks, Geoff Boyle, Director of Photography FBKS (Wallander, Mutant Chronicles), Jonathan Smiles, Digital Production Supervisor (District 9, Green Zone), Luke Rainey, Colourist (Band of Brothers, Man on Wire), Professor Duncan Petrie, Professor Sean Cubitt, Dr Richard Misek and Dr Charlotte Crofts. The day consisted of four sessions: image capture, data management, colour grading, and display. Each of the four sessions comprised a presentation by a film industry professional, a presentation by a film academic to open up wider questions, and a dialogue between the two. The intention was to introduce the practice of each to the other and of both to the general public, facilitating an open conversation about the aesthetic issues, pressures, technologies, and production roles involved in contemporary film production. The event finished with a panel discussion with the assembled speakers.
In conceiving this set of resources I had realised that at the birth of photochemical cinematography, 100 years before the inception of new digital media, no verbatim reports had been captured due to the lack of recording technology at the time. 100 years later at the birth of Digital Cinematography we had the technology and all of its affordances that would also allow the generation of new knowledge in the act of capture itself. The Verbatim History of Digital Cinematography originated from this context so there are interviews with people involved in the design of the new capture and display media, artists, academics and professionals working in the new medium discussing the effect on the audience and themselves of the new medium.
This then developed into this separate portfolio, Understanding Digital Cinematography, within which there are a series text-based online resources, downloadable pdfs with information for practitioners and academics, articles, conference presentations, notes on digital workflows authored by myself and commissioned by Creative England in association with the Watershed Media Centre, talks to research communities, recorded symposia, plus documentation of lighting and HDR research demonstrations. Ethical clearance was obtained and best practice applied in the gathering of interviews.
To jump-start the dissemination of my developing grasp of the key issues of Digital Cinematography, I joined together with Dr Richard Misek to instigate a symposium entitled The Look from Capture to Display. This was to become an important beginning for a strand of research where I was to pair academics with industry professionals to begin to translate their different jargon for a general audience. My intention at the time was simply to try to demystify the movement of film and video footage through the digital production process from camera to exhibition. Much later, after my AHRC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship, this was to lead to the idea of an Immersive Learning Environment (informed by the Camera and Lens Tests I was to set up at UWE) where people from the same discipline could generate a kind of working lingua franca to translate what each was saying to the other from their differing perspectives. (An example of this would be a signal processing engineer trying to share ideas with a trainee camera assistant. Although each comes from the same discipline they would need to work towards an understanding of their different process-specific jargons or argot).
Previously, the ‘look’ of a film was the domain of the cinematographer, yet as a result of the various new forms of image manipulation that had appeared in the last decade and a half, new types of collaboration had resulted – for example, between cinematographers, post-production supervisors, visual effects artists, and colourists. Given the multiplicity of ways in which the aesthetics of a film can be changed after shooting is complete, and people in the role other than cinematographer could affect the look of a film, a key question presented itself: who then controls what aspects of a film’s look? To begin to answer this, I and Dr Richard Misek formulated a symposium to explore the answer.
This symposium traced how the ‘look’ of a shot changes at each stage of this process, explained some of the technologies that effect these changes, and discussed the decision-making behind these changes with experts and interested parties – stakeholders – from different sections of research encompassing both academia and industry. This in effect was to set the tone for the rest of the research period. This symposium also explored the reorganisation of production roles and responsibilities that had resulted from the digitisation of film-making workflows.
The symposium drew from a range of specialisms, bridging theory and practice. Invited speakers included: Cinematographer Ben Smithard (The Damned United, Cranford, Spooks, Geoff Boyle, Director of Photography FBKS (Wallander, Mutant Chronicles), Jonathan Smiles, Digital Production Supervisor (District 9, Green Zone), Luke Rainey, Colourist (Band of Brothers, Man on Wire), Professor Duncan Petrie, Professor Sean Cubitt, Dr Richard Misek and Dr Charlotte Crofts. The day consisted of four sessions: image capture, data management, colour grading, and display. Each of the four sessions comprised a presentation by a film industry professional, a presentation by a film academic to open up wider questions, and a dialogue between the two. The intention was to introduce the practice of each to the other and of both to the general public, facilitating an open conversation about the aesthetic issues, pressures, technologies, and production roles involved in contemporary film production. The event finished with a panel discussion with the assembled speakers.
Knowledge Exchange and experiments in Higher Dynamic Range 2010 - 2012
In December 2010 I was awarded a second, two-year, AHRC Fellowship also at the University of Bristol. This was originally called a Knowledge Transfer Fellowship and was focused on transferring the results of the first fellowship with industry and academia. But academia had begun to realise that transfer is assertive whilst exchange is reflexive my fellowship was renamed a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship. I went through that conceptual shift at the same time. Within this fellowship I innovated strategies to clarify what knowledge could be gained from the original research that involved the creation of 20 workshops with the following aims:
These workshops engaged professionals, undergraduates, graduate students and academics and involved innovation of methods of fast dissemination of complex new knowledge. I maintained a set of before and after responses to online questionnaires to establish the efficacy of the methods used, and then published The Practice of Knowledge Exchange, an article that debated the nature of research, how knowledge is exchanged and how new methods are developed or may be innovated. This article therefore summates the information gathered from the 20 workshops undertaken. This laid the foundations for the ideas mentioned earlier: Immersive Learning Environments (and later its developed state as an Advanced Innovation Laboratory).
In a paper at University of Westminster in late 2012 I had argued the following:
In December 2010 I was awarded a second, two-year, AHRC Fellowship also at the University of Bristol. This was originally called a Knowledge Transfer Fellowship and was focused on transferring the results of the first fellowship with industry and academia. But academia had begun to realise that transfer is assertive whilst exchange is reflexive my fellowship was renamed a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship. I went through that conceptual shift at the same time. Within this fellowship I innovated strategies to clarify what knowledge could be gained from the original research that involved the creation of 20 workshops with the following aims:
- Create points of knowledge exchange that would produce debate on the knowledge revealed by my AHRC Fellowship
- Formulate a means of evaluating who would attend and what they knew of the field before coming
- Formulate a means of evaluating what they learned during the exchange and a reliable measurement of that increase in knowledge
These workshops engaged professionals, undergraduates, graduate students and academics and involved innovation of methods of fast dissemination of complex new knowledge. I maintained a set of before and after responses to online questionnaires to establish the efficacy of the methods used, and then published The Practice of Knowledge Exchange, an article that debated the nature of research, how knowledge is exchanged and how new methods are developed or may be innovated. This article therefore summates the information gathered from the 20 workshops undertaken. This laid the foundations for the ideas mentioned earlier: Immersive Learning Environments (and later its developed state as an Advanced Innovation Laboratory).
In a paper at University of Westminster in late 2012 I had argued the following:
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Neuroscientists tell us that the brain is asymmetric in some of its functions and consequently the right-brain governs left-side operations and left-brain governs right-side operations. Though vision occurs in both hemispheres of the brain, it’s said that left-brain levels a narrow-focused attention on the world and right-brain utilises broad attention. Significant then, that 99% of cinematographers construct an image with their right-eye focused about 2 inches into a viewfinder, using their left-brain narrow-focused attention - whereas cinema audiences watch the output of the cinematographers endeavours at a much greater distance, with their right-brain, left-eye, broad-attention, dominant view of the world.
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Effectively in relaying this insight I was also determining my own position. I certainly had taken on the positivist issues from my prior research but here I was beginning to formulate questions that asked certain other issues to be taken into account. Some of this had been derived through fruitful exchanges of information with industry and academia but the idea to consider a particular question was surfacing in my mind: what was the nature of the consciousness that was regarding the world? Was it simply a set of reactive functionalities, or was there something more to be discovered about the idea of the gaze?
I then moved to Department of Engineering at Bristol as a Senior Research Fellow to explore deeper aspects of the construction of the image from an entirely different perspective. An additional question arose for me which can be rendered thus: can a person who is apparently ignorant of the deeper levels of information and wisdom currently held of a subject area creatively contribute to the expansion of the very same knowledge base? In fact I was my own test case for this question – not in terms of ignorance of the subject area as I had engineering knowledge, but actually in terms of the potential differing forms of expression of what I actually knew. Might my own cultural differences with my engineering colleagues, coming from an arts and humanities background, open new areas of research?
By the beginning of 2013, documenting the thoughts of key people in the subject area within The Verbatim History of Digital Cinematography though useful was also to some degree limited. Possibly my engagement and growing understanding of the creation of knowledge exchange with people of different capacities and experience made me realise that simply recording attitudes was not enough. In addition, I had been invited to become Director of the Centre for Moving Image Research at the University of the West of England under the title Professor of Cinematography.
Within this new post and also on a wider level than the particular university I was then working at, I realised I had to set up provocations to conventional assumptions to then investigate the claims of the discipline. These assumptions were often made by manufacturers that were expounding certain beliefs (i.e. that a camera had 13 stops of latitude for instance). Was this actually true? To do this I realised I needed a variety of skill sets that I alone did not have.
My thinking developed such that I had come to suspect that it was the act of knowledge exchange itself – not only between individuals at different tiers of knowledge – masters, PhD candidates, post doctoral research fellow, senior research fellow, professorial – that was the issue. Therefore, the exchange between different tiers of knowledge within different disciplines became my focus, which meant that I should then purposefully set up research behaviours to explore the veracity of that perception.
A key concept arising from this realisation is that as a part of a scaffolded investigation this output differed from the first three as it was formulated as a research resource to collate and summate the knowledge gathered in the entire AHRC Fellowship. However, due to developments in the research in this collation and dissemination, the portfolio first transmuted then transcended its purpose and stimulated a new trajectory of research. Later, as the results of knowledge exchange and a development of thinking occurred alongside the advent of a surge of new technical developments, the emphasis within this PARP came to summate the overall research thrust of the entire research framework.
As an exemplar of this transitional process from online resources to a knowledge exchange process which created deeper engagements, by 2014 I had developed a set of camera and lens tests with Geoff Boyle of CML. These both formalised professional instrument testing and integrated the practice and the theory of cinematography for both professionals and academics. These also then developed into a means of exploring the possibilities and principles behind the potential of an Immersive Learning Environment. CMIR and CML published results on the tests at industry events at NAB in Las Vegas and IBC in Amsterdam, on the Cinematographers Mailing list and on CMIR’s website for academic colleagues. These also exist as an online resource - though very technical. As an example go here: https://cinematography.net/CML-CMIR-Lens-Tests.html
What was of major importance to me about the camera tests was the making familiar to academics and industry professionals of shared processes to come to an agreed position on research. These enabled people from the same discipline, though from different viewpoints, to access a set of test principles that could hold the medium to account. In so doing I realised that we should create an industry profile for academia, via the Centre for Moving Image Research, to become a familiar persona at industry gatherings such as the regular International Broadcasting Conventions in Amsterdam and the National Association of Broadcasters events in Los Vegas. As this happened, academics would report to industry an accurate picture of the changes in these emerging technologies, thus giving academia credibility with industry.
Yet in parallel with these developments of dialogic processes within knowledge exchange as exemplified in the camera tests, I had also been in pursuit of an understanding of what the act of looking might mean. In fact I felt I needed to examine the sentient gaze philosophically. To do so I searched for a demonstrable position on the cognitive neuroscientific philosophical stance and found that in Merlin Donald’s seminal work The Origins of the Modern Mind. I chose cognitive neuroscience as a summative discipline of all the materialist disciplines as it seemed to accept the ‘evidence’ of any discipline that preceded it, that had a foot in the materialist camp. Here I was examining the idea that ‘evidence’ provided by ‘facts’ could and should also be interrogated. As I read, my own long discomfort with that position started to crystallise into a suspicion that there was an active ideology beneath that construct.
I then wrote a paper for the 2013 International Symposium for Electronic art entitled The Future of the Moving Image which I later refined and published online with Sydney University. Early on in the article I had voiced an opinion about the continuous hunt for the new, better, higher resolution cameras:
I then moved to Department of Engineering at Bristol as a Senior Research Fellow to explore deeper aspects of the construction of the image from an entirely different perspective. An additional question arose for me which can be rendered thus: can a person who is apparently ignorant of the deeper levels of information and wisdom currently held of a subject area creatively contribute to the expansion of the very same knowledge base? In fact I was my own test case for this question – not in terms of ignorance of the subject area as I had engineering knowledge, but actually in terms of the potential differing forms of expression of what I actually knew. Might my own cultural differences with my engineering colleagues, coming from an arts and humanities background, open new areas of research?
By the beginning of 2013, documenting the thoughts of key people in the subject area within The Verbatim History of Digital Cinematography though useful was also to some degree limited. Possibly my engagement and growing understanding of the creation of knowledge exchange with people of different capacities and experience made me realise that simply recording attitudes was not enough. In addition, I had been invited to become Director of the Centre for Moving Image Research at the University of the West of England under the title Professor of Cinematography.
Within this new post and also on a wider level than the particular university I was then working at, I realised I had to set up provocations to conventional assumptions to then investigate the claims of the discipline. These assumptions were often made by manufacturers that were expounding certain beliefs (i.e. that a camera had 13 stops of latitude for instance). Was this actually true? To do this I realised I needed a variety of skill sets that I alone did not have.
My thinking developed such that I had come to suspect that it was the act of knowledge exchange itself – not only between individuals at different tiers of knowledge – masters, PhD candidates, post doctoral research fellow, senior research fellow, professorial – that was the issue. Therefore, the exchange between different tiers of knowledge within different disciplines became my focus, which meant that I should then purposefully set up research behaviours to explore the veracity of that perception.
A key concept arising from this realisation is that as a part of a scaffolded investigation this output differed from the first three as it was formulated as a research resource to collate and summate the knowledge gathered in the entire AHRC Fellowship. However, due to developments in the research in this collation and dissemination, the portfolio first transmuted then transcended its purpose and stimulated a new trajectory of research. Later, as the results of knowledge exchange and a development of thinking occurred alongside the advent of a surge of new technical developments, the emphasis within this PARP came to summate the overall research thrust of the entire research framework.
As an exemplar of this transitional process from online resources to a knowledge exchange process which created deeper engagements, by 2014 I had developed a set of camera and lens tests with Geoff Boyle of CML. These both formalised professional instrument testing and integrated the practice and the theory of cinematography for both professionals and academics. These also then developed into a means of exploring the possibilities and principles behind the potential of an Immersive Learning Environment. CMIR and CML published results on the tests at industry events at NAB in Las Vegas and IBC in Amsterdam, on the Cinematographers Mailing list and on CMIR’s website for academic colleagues. These also exist as an online resource - though very technical. As an example go here: https://cinematography.net/CML-CMIR-Lens-Tests.html
What was of major importance to me about the camera tests was the making familiar to academics and industry professionals of shared processes to come to an agreed position on research. These enabled people from the same discipline, though from different viewpoints, to access a set of test principles that could hold the medium to account. In so doing I realised that we should create an industry profile for academia, via the Centre for Moving Image Research, to become a familiar persona at industry gatherings such as the regular International Broadcasting Conventions in Amsterdam and the National Association of Broadcasters events in Los Vegas. As this happened, academics would report to industry an accurate picture of the changes in these emerging technologies, thus giving academia credibility with industry.
Yet in parallel with these developments of dialogic processes within knowledge exchange as exemplified in the camera tests, I had also been in pursuit of an understanding of what the act of looking might mean. In fact I felt I needed to examine the sentient gaze philosophically. To do so I searched for a demonstrable position on the cognitive neuroscientific philosophical stance and found that in Merlin Donald’s seminal work The Origins of the Modern Mind. I chose cognitive neuroscience as a summative discipline of all the materialist disciplines as it seemed to accept the ‘evidence’ of any discipline that preceded it, that had a foot in the materialist camp. Here I was examining the idea that ‘evidence’ provided by ‘facts’ could and should also be interrogated. As I read, my own long discomfort with that position started to crystallise into a suspicion that there was an active ideology beneath that construct.
I then wrote a paper for the 2013 International Symposium for Electronic art entitled The Future of the Moving Image which I later refined and published online with Sydney University. Early on in the article I had voiced an opinion about the continuous hunt for the new, better, higher resolution cameras:
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But at this point in time, questions of ‘what next on the horizon’ do the subject an injustice. That we are interested in expanded parameters of the moving image simply as a product of ‘scientific’ curiosity is misplaced. Cognitive neuroscience provides us with an idea of the nature of the paradigm change we are undergoing to accompany the invention of the digital. The narrative that develops places the emphasis on what is looking rather than what is being looked at and by whom and so comes to rest on the nature of the sensorium that is gazing at the moving image - and not the technical construction of the moving image itself.
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Having examined and reflected on the position taken by Donald I had come to my own conclusion and wanted to convey this to colleagues in both academia and industry:
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The point of examining at length the cognitive-neuroscientific worldview, in this case through the work of a pre-eminent exponent, is that in grasping at cognitive-neuroscientific methodology to solve the evaluative needs of subject areas that prior to now have used language to reveal the issues at play, is to point out their ideological commitment to materialistic progress so that we might moderate that belief in our own work. Of course if as researchers we already subscribe to that idea, then it will remain to others to challenge the idea, because unspoken and undeclared interests do not chime in academic, scholarly and theoretic disciplines.
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So I had identified a position that I felt was not completely neutral in its assessment of the act of gazing at the world. Yet this position was collectively accepted and that spread deep into both academia and industry. Later I was to be told by members of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) who had read my papers and were following the research, that it had swayed their own position on research. This resulted in an invitation both to AMPAS I (the Academy of Motion Pictures Science and Technology Committee) and the ASC itself.
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Through this exchange between industry and academia, my research centre began to be contacted by senior academics who were themselves beginning to branch out, for instance Professor Stefan Grandinetti from Stuttgart Media University, and to exchange research information on Higher Dynamic Range Imaging. Importantly for this exchange, in 2014 I initiated the first Advanced Innovation Laboratory at the Arnolfini as part of the Encounters Moving Image Festival. Here we created the first example of HDR imaging during a week-long workshop where people from varying disciplines and pathways (academia, industry, artists) to come together to solve a problem. They did this not only vertically within one discipline (from student to professor, from apprentice to cinematographer) but also horizontally across different disciplines. This process enabled us to create images that evidenced a new phenomenon which revealed depth within 2D images. In the past, moving images have used the trick of binocular stereopsis (tricking the brain into seeing depth by strobing different sets of information rapidly through each eye). Here we became aware that our first successful attempts at creating a functional route from capture to display in HDR also revealed depth in the image. We then organised a set of screening for public audiences of 25 members to teach them to see this new phenomenon. In Summer 2015 I was invited to speak to the Science and Technology Committee of the Academy of Motion Pictures about our HDR experiments and at that meeting I was inducted as an observer at further meetings with regard HDR.
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In September 2015 I initiated the first Bristol International Festival of Cinematography where I was attempting to cement the act of knowledge exchange between academia, Industry and public. The workshops recorded demonstrated many functions of cinematography that would help to clarify the disinformation I had noted both in industry and academia earlier. The point here was to create a standard of information for industry and academia alike, which would be placed online. By January 2016 I was invited to speak on the subject of Higher Dynamic Range research at the London British Society of Cinematographers Expo, which was attended by participants from around the world. I took the lead presentation on a panel with industry professionals: https://vimeo.com/162959893. By Summer 2016 I had been invited to speak at The International Cinematography Summit in Los Angeles. This was a four yearly gathering of the presidents of cinematographic Societies, manufacturers as well as many leading Oscar-winning cinematographers including Vittorio Storraro (Apocalypse Now, The Spider’s Stratagem) Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, The Revenant) and is organized by the American Society of Cinematographers. In Autumn 2016 I was asked to join the education council of IMAGO (world federation of Cinematographic Societies) that represents Cinematography Oscar winners worldwide.
At gatherings such as these I was told that there was a readership of my papers (i.e. by Frederic Goodich Sergeant-at-Arms of the ASC) and because of their enthusiasm I was confident that I should carry on in my push to engage industry thought-leaders
At gatherings such as these I was told that there was a readership of my papers (i.e. by Frederic Goodich Sergeant-at-Arms of the ASC) and because of their enthusiasm I was confident that I should carry on in my push to engage industry thought-leaders
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As I explained earlier, in my own study area of capture and display of moving images, how we capture and how we display, and how we see what that process is, are so intimately connected such that the resonation back and forth in the lab where we construct this new technology affects what we do and who we are at the same time. We invent something then look in awe at eachother, at the fact that as we are inventing the form we start to see something we’d never seen before. We are either learning to see something we’d not seen before or we are changing both the technology and ourselves at the same time so that we are actually seeing differently.
As this is happening our conviction is growing that we are about to experience a step-change in the peak of technological inventiveness. In every research lab I’ve been in for the last 20 years I’ve witnessed activity that tells me that the human project is furiously working on the area of synthesizing the behaviour of the human senses to materialise those senses such that we can then manipulate our own reality in a variety of ways - and of course those senses combined with the common sense, the mind – all of those contribute to the idea of a sensorium experiencing a ‘reality’.
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In September 2016 at the second iteration of The Bristol International Festival of Cinematography, CMIR demonstrated the highest level of HDR image yet seen, to an audience of academics, public and professionals. Here I was fulfilling my research agenda of not only disseminating but creating new knowledge as it happened. HDR Demonstration https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3738&v=WbMjCm8vFF0
I then agreed that Professor Stephan Grandinetti could then take the results of our research and represent it in Bydgoszcz at CameraImage in 2016, the leading Cinematography Festival in the World.
NEXT: Portfolio 4 Complete List of Outputs
I then agreed that Professor Stephan Grandinetti could then take the results of our research and represent it in Bydgoszcz at CameraImage in 2016, the leading Cinematography Festival in the World.
NEXT: Portfolio 4 Complete List of Outputs