Will Aesthetics Save Cinematography?
All was simple in the last millennium. The cinematographer selected the composition of the frame, exposed the film according to the light-meter, checked printing lights during the dailies, and worked with the colorist on the Hazeltine (an "ancient" film-based color correction machine) in the preparation for the first answer print. Undoubtedly and unquestionably, the Director of Photography was in charge of imagery.
In that time, Cinematography and Imagery were synonyms. Rarely would anyone dare to get into the framing and lighting part of the movie, other than the director. Except for the Indian Film Industry, every other country's film industry had a Cinematographer team and a Lighting team separate, which is still in practice. The Cinematographer will tell the mood of the picture and the Lighting team is responsible for the usage of lights. There are a lot of people in Cinematography team like the gaffer, focus puller, assistants.
Times have changed now. "Star Wars" was one major reason where movies moved to the next level : inclusion of VFX. Star Wars created a cultural and technological phenomenon and forever changed the traditional roles and interplay between the Director (George Lucas), DP (Gilbert Taylor) and SFX/VFX Team (ILM).
Three decades later, in 2009, with "Avatar", the industry embraced a non-linear/real-time pipeline for production. The traditional "assembly line" phases have been replaced with the mentality that what happens in any stage of production can directly affect prior or subsequent stages of production.
Expanded cinematography is the combination of live and virtual cinematography which has begun to dominate today's image making in motion pictures, TV and Web programming and video games. Fortunately or unfortunately, Cinematography has changed from being just cinematography to a combination of VFX, CG and Cinematography. Every movie has these three departments. With the invasion of technology, Cinema has changed from being just about performances and manpower to more technical.
What makes today's situation even more confusing is that traditional cinematography exists in parallel with expanded cinematography, and the dividing lines of responsibilities and influence on the final result have become blurred, and often controversial.
The digital revolution has also complicated the field of cinematography. Now, anyone with a consumer DSLR camera can claim to be a visual storyteller and the resulting mass of their content has influenced the aesthetics of visuals around us. Basic Rendering softwares and Color grading techniques, available either free or paid in online has made each one a cinematographer.
The question facing us is whether an individual even needs professional cinematography, and, if so, what will differentiate it from the cinematography of the masses? How do we preserve cinematography as an art form in the era of limitless possibilities of CGI and the Internet-based global image exchange between billions of people? Will we be replaced in the not too distant future by computers which can calculate lighting levels, color rendition depth of field, set lights, and choose the visual style and composition much faster than any DP?
We, the cinematographers, need to be Directors of Imagery i.e, to be fluent in Expanded Cinematography's mix of Traditional and Virtual Cinematography. The industry does a lot to upgrade the technical skill of cinematographers. Isn't it time to give new artistic tools to the cinematographer profession?
There has always been a talk in the industry that Cinematographers are story tellers. But, in reality, they are illustrating stories. They illustrate the same way an artist or a designer does. And this is what cinematographers do in the asthetical point of view in the names of Tones, Contrast and Color values, Positive and negative space etc.
To begin to educate ourselves creatively, we should start to look at cinematography as a genre of a very specific form of art, but still as art. Cinematography does not belong to any kind of traditional artistic and aesthetic activities. Neither camera movement, nor lighting, optical prospective, color, contrast, nor any other specific letters of the "cinematography alphabet" which created the language of cinematography, can exist by itself, but can only go with the script.
From the beginning, cinematographers adopted the tools of art. In fact, the history of visual elements in cinema is a history of "adoption" of elements from the other arts. For a long time, cinematographers have been influenced by artists around the world. The space, color, dimension etc have had influences from the paintings. When Film Noir happened, Lighting slowly took a major turn. Cinematographers tried using lightings from paintings and either replicated or took it as an inspiration. Impressionists had a major impact on movies as that changed the way cinematography was seen. There was much more depth and space, both in paintings and camera angles.
With the introduction of Cubists, and later, abstract expressionists, traditional space in painting became two-dimensional. And the use of telephoto lenses -- not as a magnifying glass, but as a tool for condensing a space - was used in French and Italian films in the 1960s, just confirms again the spiral-like relationship between paintings and film.
I believe it is necessary for cinematographers to start to think about the place of our profession in the past and present cultural and stylistic time-line in order to try to look to tomorrow, and with the feeling of cinematography as a specific kind of art which uses sophisticated technological tools for creating imagery, which helps to tell all kinds of stories artistically.
Hence, if an adoption from other arts is the root cause for artistic activities in the information age - including cinematography, what do we adopt today in order to be on par with today's ever-increasing demands for original and complex imagery? It would be wrong to establist a set of rules for cinematography, especially when it has broken many stereotypes and has been under tests and experimentations for aesthetics. But, the evolution of cinematography and its survival will always continue under the following factors : Technical, Social and Aeshtetics.
We are now in the beginning of the next stage of our professional evolution; let's not miss the chance.
In that time, Cinematography and Imagery were synonyms. Rarely would anyone dare to get into the framing and lighting part of the movie, other than the director. Except for the Indian Film Industry, every other country's film industry had a Cinematographer team and a Lighting team separate, which is still in practice. The Cinematographer will tell the mood of the picture and the Lighting team is responsible for the usage of lights. There are a lot of people in Cinematography team like the gaffer, focus puller, assistants.
Times have changed now. "Star Wars" was one major reason where movies moved to the next level : inclusion of VFX. Star Wars created a cultural and technological phenomenon and forever changed the traditional roles and interplay between the Director (George Lucas), DP (Gilbert Taylor) and SFX/VFX Team (ILM).
Three decades later, in 2009, with "Avatar", the industry embraced a non-linear/real-time pipeline for production. The traditional "assembly line" phases have been replaced with the mentality that what happens in any stage of production can directly affect prior or subsequent stages of production.
Expanded cinematography is the combination of live and virtual cinematography which has begun to dominate today's image making in motion pictures, TV and Web programming and video games. Fortunately or unfortunately, Cinematography has changed from being just cinematography to a combination of VFX, CG and Cinematography. Every movie has these three departments. With the invasion of technology, Cinema has changed from being just about performances and manpower to more technical.
What makes today's situation even more confusing is that traditional cinematography exists in parallel with expanded cinematography, and the dividing lines of responsibilities and influence on the final result have become blurred, and often controversial.
The digital revolution has also complicated the field of cinematography. Now, anyone with a consumer DSLR camera can claim to be a visual storyteller and the resulting mass of their content has influenced the aesthetics of visuals around us. Basic Rendering softwares and Color grading techniques, available either free or paid in online has made each one a cinematographer.
The question facing us is whether an individual even needs professional cinematography, and, if so, what will differentiate it from the cinematography of the masses? How do we preserve cinematography as an art form in the era of limitless possibilities of CGI and the Internet-based global image exchange between billions of people? Will we be replaced in the not too distant future by computers which can calculate lighting levels, color rendition depth of field, set lights, and choose the visual style and composition much faster than any DP?
We, the cinematographers, need to be Directors of Imagery i.e, to be fluent in Expanded Cinematography's mix of Traditional and Virtual Cinematography. The industry does a lot to upgrade the technical skill of cinematographers. Isn't it time to give new artistic tools to the cinematographer profession?
There has always been a talk in the industry that Cinematographers are story tellers. But, in reality, they are illustrating stories. They illustrate the same way an artist or a designer does. And this is what cinematographers do in the asthetical point of view in the names of Tones, Contrast and Color values, Positive and negative space etc.
To begin to educate ourselves creatively, we should start to look at cinematography as a genre of a very specific form of art, but still as art. Cinematography does not belong to any kind of traditional artistic and aesthetic activities. Neither camera movement, nor lighting, optical prospective, color, contrast, nor any other specific letters of the "cinematography alphabet" which created the language of cinematography, can exist by itself, but can only go with the script.
From the beginning, cinematographers adopted the tools of art. In fact, the history of visual elements in cinema is a history of "adoption" of elements from the other arts. For a long time, cinematographers have been influenced by artists around the world. The space, color, dimension etc have had influences from the paintings. When Film Noir happened, Lighting slowly took a major turn. Cinematographers tried using lightings from paintings and either replicated or took it as an inspiration. Impressionists had a major impact on movies as that changed the way cinematography was seen. There was much more depth and space, both in paintings and camera angles.
With the introduction of Cubists, and later, abstract expressionists, traditional space in painting became two-dimensional. And the use of telephoto lenses -- not as a magnifying glass, but as a tool for condensing a space - was used in French and Italian films in the 1960s, just confirms again the spiral-like relationship between paintings and film.
I believe it is necessary for cinematographers to start to think about the place of our profession in the past and present cultural and stylistic time-line in order to try to look to tomorrow, and with the feeling of cinematography as a specific kind of art which uses sophisticated technological tools for creating imagery, which helps to tell all kinds of stories artistically.
Hence, if an adoption from other arts is the root cause for artistic activities in the information age - including cinematography, what do we adopt today in order to be on par with today's ever-increasing demands for original and complex imagery? It would be wrong to establist a set of rules for cinematography, especially when it has broken many stereotypes and has been under tests and experimentations for aesthetics. But, the evolution of cinematography and its survival will always continue under the following factors : Technical, Social and Aeshtetics.
We are now in the beginning of the next stage of our professional evolution; let's not miss the chance.
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