Films, books, videos, cd-roms, works with Digital Cinema implications are examined here, links to other pages.

Welcome.

Ideas are like the weather.

There are dry spells and hot spells... Times when not much is going on. Mentally your're as active as a lizard baking in the sun. Then seemingly from out of nowhere, a new idea can build like a thunderhead, suddenly blowing in, driving rain, changing everything in its wake. Now, like a jaguar at hunt, your mind is in overdrive, alive with possibility.

Ideas are like that.

Here at Tech Head we believe that in times of rapid change it pays to monitor your environment. Thunderhead ideas happen all the time. One must identify change as far out on our mental horizon as possible in order to maximize the time available to prepare. A thunderhead idea will either roll over, on, or by us. Ignore us? Never.

What's on your radar screen today?

The digital cinema maker lives in an interdisciplinary world where boundaries between catagories are no longer crisp. Things are fuzzy. Seemingly unrelated developments, loosely coupled events, or non-linear states form a mental jungle alive with ideas, humid with possibility for the digital filmmaker.

Accordingly, creative work, regardless of media, that has implications for the digital cinema maker will be examined here. Books, film, media, music, art, and ideas, contain information and inspiration for digital filmmakers. Tech Head will be your radar.

Let's examine some horizons.

La Jetee:

In Digital Cinema ideas drive technology. Quite often aesthetics, structure, and content are out ahead of technology. We can see this in a short film made over thirty years ago.

Chris Marker made La Jetee in 1962. A French independent filmmaker, he's been making films for more than thirty years. La Jetee is of interest to the digital cinema maker on a variety of levels.
The film, twenty eight minutes in length, conceptually becomes a zone where Mapussant meets Asimov. In a near future, a nuclear holocost ravages the world. Underneath the ruins of Paris, desperate survivors experiment with time travel. Those with vivid dreams are the most desired candidates. Subjects go mad unable to withstand the shock of time travel. Our hero, a prisoner, has a particularly vivid memory of the past. His dreams are spied on. Selected for the next experiement, his mission is to make contact with the past and the future to aid the hapless victims of an impossible present. In the past he falls in love with a woman who appears to be as out of time as he is. Over the course of his visits they explore time in its many forms.

As he gets better and better at time travel, his research controller captors send him into the future, never to return to the past. He's in crisis. The people of the future travel to his time to offer him aslyum in their era. He rejects it, asking to be returned to the past, reunited with his love. They agree. In the past, on an airport quay, an agent from his part of the future kills him not only in front of his love but also in front of himself as a young child. He has witnessed his own death.

Cool.

For the digital cinema maker there is much to learn from Chris Marker. Both the tale and the technique yield insight. Marker's brilliant tale of time ... its movement, its representation... both mentaly and cinematicaly, present the complexity of time and its indeterminancy... simply, powerfully, and rivitingly.

As you compose your screenplays and scenarios for your next Digital Cinema production, consider what Marker accomplished in La Jetee. The tale is simple in the telling, yet what it makes us think about is very complex. Ideas, many of them, resonate in our conciousness long after this short film fades from the screen. Would every work of Digital Cinema achieve this level of simple yet complex elegance.

Make your work about something that matters and is important to you. Communicate that visualy with sound to others. Do it digitaly.

The goal of Digital Cinema is not to recreate reality, rather it is to communicate some view of reality. What can we learn from Marker in this regard? Marker's technique is to suggest the future rather than spelling it out in extreme detail as George Lucas did in the Star Wars Trilogy.

Low res.

In a low resolution environment, the viewer fills in the resonating space between the details with ones own meaning. Involvement. Marshall McLuhan observed this phenomenon. McLuhan catogrizes various media as hot and cool. Cool mediums are low resolution with little detail. Yet mediums cool elicit intense viewer participation. The viewer fills in what isn't there. Like Goddard in his film Alphaville, Marker selects aspects of contempory Paris to stand for the future. There isn't a lot of detail in the frame but there's enough.

The same is true for the soundtrack. It's all voiceover narration with some music and even less sound effects. Behind the narrator, in the camp lab, we hear whispering voices. They speak German. It is enough for the viewer to create a mental expierence of the scene. The narration is tightly written with powerful verbal images. What isn't said is as important as what is said. The music is evoquative and a powerful element is creating the scenes meaning.

Marker creates resonating spaces laden with meaning.

Visually Marker has pulled off this cinematic tour de force with black and white still images. Marker has made a moving picture without any movement. In a work about time, his characters are frozen in cinematic time. Amazing.

There is though a different type of movement, other than natural, in La Jetee. Cinematic movement is present. The still frames are in effect animated. There are camera moves over images. Dissolves, cuts, and fades link the images. There are resonant compositions filled with gaze and longing.

One shot in the film moves. It appears approxamatly twenty minutes into the film. The woman from the past, who has been sleeping, suddenly opens her eyes and smiles. Looking directly into the camera, she smiles at us. The next shot is once again still as are all shots through to the end of the film. There is no change in music, Marker does nothing to call attention to the moving shot. The film merely continues leaving a stunned audience in its wake.

The effect is startling. It is as if a statue suddenly and without warning, came to life. It streches, shifts its weight, and resumes its stance with a new pose, returning to the eternal stillness that we have come to expect from figures carved from marble. For a moment one of Marker's characters breaks out of frozen photographic time into fluid cinematic time. Upon first viewing, one isn't really sure that there was actually a moving shot. La Jetee is a film where movement is a special effect.

Marker moved his audience in a major way not with a story point but with cinematic technique. It's not applied gratousily, but rather within the constraints of story context and film meaning. In a story about time it is very effective to have no natural movement and juxtipose it against one brief flash of movement. The technique has context and meaning within the framework of a meditation on time. Without that framework it's just a stunt.

The Digital Cinema maker should heed this insight. It provides a path for succesfully using the new digital techniques of morph, warp, overlay, composite, and underlay in ways that support communicating meaning rather than impeeding it. Don't create a digital effect for its own sake. Without context a morph becomes a cool move with no meaning. It's forgotten moments later because it has no meaning outside itself. On the other hand by following Marker's approach of integrating a technical effect into the context of all the other levels of meaning, technique enhances meaning. Technique creates meaning. Something has been made that will be remembered long after the viewing is over.

Our new digital paint, video, animation, and sound tools provide us with new ways to create images. However if those new images are to mean anything, then they must work with other all the other elements that create meaning within a cinematic work. Ask yourself what is this effect telling us? If there is no answer, work with it until there is. Or get rid of it. A tightly integrated cinematic work enhances ones chance at creating something meaningful.

That's the scan for now. Check back soon for more brainstorm warnings.