I've thought about this lately particularly in relation to the recent Careers Expo seminar we had on Wednesday where one of the course's graduates explained that his job was to produce videos for real estate companies wishing to make their websites more interesting. What fascinated me was the fact that this guy had intended to pursue a career in television and film editing and had decided when on a particular freelance editing job one day, to take up a partnership with another post-production artist in the current business he now runs.
What I want to figure out is, what was so appealing about producing online content over editing TV and Film? What is involved in the process and is there really a difference between the 2? A little research helped me answer some of these questions.
Online Content, or Web Content as it is more widely known, is defined broadly by authors Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville as " 'the stuff in your Web site." That includes text, visual, audio and animations. Ok then, so basically all the stuff we are used to seeing in the big wide world just on the internet. So how do these all differ from the same content that's produced elsewhere?
This all ties in nicely with Adrian's essay on "Softvideo" which explores the differences between soft media and hard media which are essentially the same terms that can be applied to my definitions above. In the essay, he references Diane Balestri as saying of soft and hard media "she discriminates between using the computer to author ‘hard copy’, that is work which requires a material substrate such as the page, and using the computer to author ‘softcopy’, work that is only intended to be presented via the immaterial substrate of the screen." Ok then, so its just merely the platform upon which the viewer is exposed to the material. I wasn't quite happy with this definition so decided to dig a little deeper.
Focusing purely on cinema now, I decided to research the works of Lev Manovich once more, a renowned media artist who not only has a background in painting and architecture, but also in computer programming. Beldning these disciplines, Manovich came up with the concept of "Soft Cinema", a solution to the current problem faced by media artists of the 21st Century who must create content that answers the queston of "How to represent the subjective experience of a person living in a global information society? If daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous messages is part of our new “data-subjectivity.” Manovich goes on to ask "how can we visualize this subjectivity in new ways using new media— without resorting to already familiar and “normalized” modernist techniques of montage, surrealism, absurd?"
His solution to this is the production of four cinema forms:
1. "Algorithmic Cinema."
Using systems of rules, software controls both the layout of the screen (number and positions of frames) and the sequences of media elements which appear in these frames.
2. "Database Cinema." The media elements are selected from a large database to construct a potentially unlimited number of different narrative films.
3. "Macro-cinema." Soft Cinema imagines how moving images may look when the Net will mature, and when unlimited bandwidth and very high resolution displays would become the norm.
4. "Multimedia cinema." In Soft Cinema video is used as only one type of representation among others: 2D animation, motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, etc.
So that's form. But what about content?
In Softvideography: Digital Video as Postliterate Practice, Adrian writes of hard copy content as being "still presented in primarily linear forms, the dimensions are relatively stable within a document, documents tend to be single objects, pagination and textual features such as headers, footers, alphabetisation, indices and tables of contents are enforced to manage usability." Softcopy content on the otherhand has "spaces [that]are no longer pages but screens, they can be multiple, variable in size, altered by the user, and that...can now be presented, and not only written, in multilinear and multisequential ways."
My final question is, how do these two dimensions of content production affect the creation of the content? This relates specifically to the K-Film projects we are now creating in class which I feel, blends the concepts of "hardcopy" cinema and "softcopy" cinema. Let's take a simple narrative and look at how a normal, conventional filmmaker such as James Cameron would approach creating that narrative compared to someone like Lev Manovich.
"The story is about Melissa who meets David on a train. Each day, the two sit closer and closer, an attraction acting like a magnet pulling them closer together. One day, when waiting for the train however, Melissa notices David's absence on the platform. As their train arrives, David is still nowhere to be seen. She boards the train and walks towards their usual seats when she hears yelling coming from the road. David can be seen racing towards the train and just as he crosses the railway tracks, the 8:05am Moreland to Flinders St passes through the crossing. Melissa watches in agony as David's life is erased by the same vehicle that gave him such hope each morning on his way to work. The flowers he was to give Melissa that morning lay scattered about the pebbles and tracks."
Firstly, this is not your a-typical Hollywood story. The narrative itself is a tragedy which doesn't work well in Hollywood film so maybe James Cameron isn't the best director to be involved but lets just say he is for arguments sake. To make this film, you would assume he would employ actors, a lighting crew, production office, hire a location, arrange meetings and script the whole story before attempting to film. Then, once his production assistant had created the shooting schedule, he would get stuck into filming the whole thing, probably taking up to 3 months to finish. Finally, he would enter all the taped content into a computerised editing software and edit the film. The narrative would be presented in your classic three act structure, working from an exposition to the climax and finally the denouement. The characters would be attractive yet with faults, normal people in an unusual situation. Finally, the whole thing would probably be shown in film festivals around the world and definitely in at least 3000 cinemas.
So how does this production approach differ to the one that we could say Manovich would take? Manovich writes of the importance of realism in softcinema as being likened to the avant garde movement "Dogma 95". The movement was started in 1995 by Danish filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg and is characterised by the following features contained withing "The Vow of Chastity" which lists a set of rules filmmakers who wish to created films of this genre must adhere to. If softcinema is made in this way, then it makes the process of converting that footage into an interactive film. With this in mind, this is how we would approach a softcinema version of the above story:
The film would have to be made on location, with all props brought it, using a hand-held camera. The films format should be on 35mm but in this day and age, it may be acceptable to use 16mm instead. The film would be in colour and not only that, but David's death would have to be alluded to rather than filmed as the Vow of Chastity states that no superficial action shall take place. Finally, the sound of the production would be completely diegetic with no additional music added on top.
From here, the film's shots would be arranged in accordance with one of the four rules Manovich created above and the entire film uploaded to an online platform. In addition, the film would never be viewed in the same way twice due to the randomness set out by the softcinema application used.
With all of this in mind, its interesting to look at the way in which soft cinema and hard cinema differentiate. The same concepts that surround these terms can also be looked at for other media art forms as today's technology develops another idea Manovich explores in relation to the future of cinema.
how is this different to producing content for other mediums? is online a medium as well when the videos themselves are made with cameras?
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