Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of the West of England, Bristol
Understanding Digital Cinematography
This output is an online research resource designed to enable a more informed understanding of the history, technology, creative possibilities and cultural significance of this new field of digital cinematography. It contains:
• ‘The Verbatim History of Digital Cinematography’ (http://www. visualfields.co.uk/UDCFront.html) interviews by Flaxton of academics, artists and technical personnel working in the new medium who discuss its capabilities and its possible effects on audiences. It provides a history of the inception of a new medium that captures the emergence of fresh understandings as they evolve, in contradistinction to the absence of contemporaneous insights at the birth of photochemical cinematography 100 years before in the 1890s.
• Text resources: articles from prominent cinematographers, innovators and Data Imaging Technicians
• ‘The Verbatim History of Analogue Video: interviews by Flaxton of nine key figures involved in its development.
• Flaxton’s ‘Some Notes on Digital Workflows’ commissioned by Watershed Media Centre and Creative England examines technical guidance notes on production pathways and provides a glossary of ideas concerning how to produce uncorrupted data.
• An 80,000 word blog regularly updated that charts new developments in this rapidly changing area.
• Recordings of a symposium, ‘The Look from Capture to Display’ (Watershed, April 2011) in which academics and practitioners gathered to discuss their understanding of digital cinematography.
• An exhibition at the P3 Gallery in London, ‘The Idea of Digitality in a Postdigital Age’, a discussion between Flaxton and various academics of key concerns.
Flaxton discussed these developments and the importance of creating a research resource at various conferences and invited talks (see portfolio) and reflected critically on the process of the creation of new knowledge about digital cinematography in ‘The Practice of Knowledge Exchange’, Journal of Media Practice, vol. 14, no. 3 (Autumn 2013).
