The impact of digital technologies on the production and consumption of moving images 2007-2016
Conclusion: The impact of digital technologies on the production and consumption of moving images 2007-2016
In the critical commentary, across 4 portfolios, I have analysed the significance of key outputs from over 150 produced during the 2007-2016 period. When originally approaching the AHRC to obtain research money to explore the nature of high-resolution imaging, I argued that I would conduct a practice as research based methodology with evaluative procedures, which would then be reflected upon critically. I also stated that those conclusions would be distributed not only through traditional academic methods such as peer reviewed articles and conference papers, but as artistic artefacts, as exhibitions to measure audience reception in different forms and latterly through talks to research communities. I argued that some of this work would have the characteristics of an intervention that would change the internal landscape of the community I was addressing.
Implicit in this research behaviour was my first and enduring research question where I had argued:
Implicit in this research behaviour was my first and enduring research question where I had argued:
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The aim of this project is to investigate - in practice and through critical reflection - what is happening to the audience gaze as it shifts from the analogue to the digital to the higher resolution. This impending change has focused my artistic concerns into the following fundamental question:
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From the vantage point of looking back over my ten year research period, if one replaces the term Definition with Resolution, Dynamic Range, Frame Rate, X, Y or Z coordinates, cuboids or colloidal hard tetragonal parallelepipeds or any other of the meta-language basics of newer technologies (such as volumetric VR or volumetric photogrammetry), then the question becomes enduring because it is fundamental to the analysis of any emergent technology.
Portfolios 1, 2 and 3 concentrated on finding a way to understand how to measure, quantitatively and qualitatively, the use of new and emerging technologies that would affect not only audiences but also the work of the creators of moving images. Here the insights were:
Because I then had to engage with knowledge exchange between academia and industry as the new framework of research enquiry, I realised that measurements of the physiology of engagement could not provide me with the whole story. What was needed was a step-change, not only in my understanding of all the processes of the act of seeing on other than physiological and psychological levels, but that I entered into a dialogic process in the act of explaining not only the results but what the results might in fact mean.
Effectively I had realised that in documenting the process of research, the dissemination of the documentation in and of itself was a primary route to expand the potential meaning of what had been analysed. This was to change the reception of the information itself, and in so doing allow deeper exchange and open up further, collaborative research procedures and possibilities. Together, these two elements: a) that positivist results could be transformed through dialogic exchange and b) that the method of dialogic exchange would be enhanced by a fast emergence of higher level internet speeds which would themselves speed up delivery of insight about the medium to a greater number of people than previously possible.
This was the foundation of my HDR work research through an Advanced Innovation Laboratory. This provided the framework within which a group of cross-disciplinary researchers could find the language that enabled each discipline to see depth within the image which convention said had no depth. From that mutual recognition both practitioners and academics could describe their insights succinctly to an audience clearly and in a short space of time.
I also created knowledge exchange engagements with other conventionally more closed organisations like the American Society of Cinematographers. In this way, I hoped that the mutual exchange and publication of results would also allow and encourage an acceleration of knowledge exchange that in itself would also make developments more rapid.
Key outputs from my research were:
Notes on Digital Workflows where a specific set of rules for Digital cinematography were listed. These were:
Portfolios 1, 2 and 3 concentrated on finding a way to understand how to measure, quantitatively and qualitatively, the use of new and emerging technologies that would affect not only audiences but also the work of the creators of moving images. Here the insights were:
- that a four-times increase in resolution produces twice the length of audience engagement
- the creation of a set of rules for the definition and practice of Digital Cinematography
Because I then had to engage with knowledge exchange between academia and industry as the new framework of research enquiry, I realised that measurements of the physiology of engagement could not provide me with the whole story. What was needed was a step-change, not only in my understanding of all the processes of the act of seeing on other than physiological and psychological levels, but that I entered into a dialogic process in the act of explaining not only the results but what the results might in fact mean.
Effectively I had realised that in documenting the process of research, the dissemination of the documentation in and of itself was a primary route to expand the potential meaning of what had been analysed. This was to change the reception of the information itself, and in so doing allow deeper exchange and open up further, collaborative research procedures and possibilities. Together, these two elements: a) that positivist results could be transformed through dialogic exchange and b) that the method of dialogic exchange would be enhanced by a fast emergence of higher level internet speeds which would themselves speed up delivery of insight about the medium to a greater number of people than previously possible.
This was the foundation of my HDR work research through an Advanced Innovation Laboratory. This provided the framework within which a group of cross-disciplinary researchers could find the language that enabled each discipline to see depth within the image which convention said had no depth. From that mutual recognition both practitioners and academics could describe their insights succinctly to an audience clearly and in a short space of time.
I also created knowledge exchange engagements with other conventionally more closed organisations like the American Society of Cinematographers. In this way, I hoped that the mutual exchange and publication of results would also allow and encourage an acceleration of knowledge exchange that in itself would also make developments more rapid.
Key outputs from my research were:
Notes on Digital Workflows where a specific set of rules for Digital cinematography were listed. These were:
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- A co-authored BBC White Paper that proposed a viable production pathway for the capture and display of HDR images
- An HDR Lab that created the first HDR images and taught audiences to see 3D space within 2D images
- A set of robust camera and lens tests that laid out the template for future work that would obtain the agreement of manufacturers, professionals and academics at internationally recognised conventions
- A rapid and velocitised exchange of information between Industry and Academia could be achieved through a deeper engagement aided by online Resources such as The Verbatim History of Digital Cinematography, The Look From Capture to Display, The Bristol Cinematography Festivals and a variety of industry engagements at the highest levels.
The end point of this research became apparent as the step-change to MR, AR and VR would require further investigations of newly emerging parameters other than resolution, frame rate and dynamic range. Importantly, these further parameters would have to be built upon what I had revealed previously as the factors that continued to be fundamental and which underpinned emerging concerns with depth and immersion, volumetric capture of spatial co-ordinates and new lightwave technologies, plus the huge change that is observably coming through quantum computing that has inbuilt associations to lightwave and volumetric capture.
I believe that I have shown in this critical commentary that during the 2007-16 period I created a coherent body of research that made a significant contribution to knowledge concerning the production and consumption of moving images occasioned by the impact of digital technologies that were emerging at this time. As evidence of this claim, I adduce that all the main institutions that govern and practice moving image technologies engaged with the result of my work and the insights it revealed. These organisations include:
- IMAGO: The central body of governance of all cinematographic societies worldwide
- AMPAS: The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences – the organisation that most film makers seek to be accepted by
- BSC: The British Society of Cinematographers (some of the most significant members of which became patrons of the Bristol International Festival of Cinematography)
- ASC: American Society of Cinematographers (A body of which all members of IMAGO have an ambition to be accepted into)
From the outset of my research, I have tried continuously to maintain a condition of reflexivity within the artefacts and the traditional forms of research outputs such that there should be an open-ended dialogue throughout the undertaking of research itself as well as its dissemination. My work has had a significant public dimension: my research artefacts have been seen at various places around the world by an audience of an estimated five million (based upon figures provided by exhibition locations end of 2018). My work seeks to bridge the divide between the artist and the technologist, between academic enquiry and industry imperatives through a dialogic process of open-ended knowledge exchange.
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