School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemRealising Middle-earth: production design and film technology(Manchester University Press, 2008)Miniatures, bigatures, digital mattes, 3D animation, costume, set and prop design, forced perspective, location and studio shoots all contributed to the creation of Middle-earth. The panoply of visual effects LOTR uses to build Middle-earth’s image has become familiar, not just from the films but also from television specials, websites, DVD appendices and commentaries, and the remarkable travelling Exhibition. Armour, prosthetics, stunt and miniature doubles, animal wranglers, blue screen, and the Massive intelligent agents are part of our language now. Weta Workshop and Weta Digital, with their army of collaborators did more than visualise the most-read – and most-imagined – book of the twentieth century. They realised the script, made real the fictional world where the narrative would take place. The challenge of realisation is in some sense the challenge of cinema itself – the French even use the word réalisation to describe filmmaking. Realising Middle-earth is both a technical challenge and a special kind of problem in realism, the aesthetic field dealing with depictions of reality (as in documentary) and the illusion of reality (as in dramatic fiction). Most complicated of all is the realisation of a world whose highest technology, the explosive device in the culvert of the Deeping Wall, is portrayed as the work of Saruman’s dark arts. Tolkien’s hatred of industrialisation comes through in the firepits of Isengard. Yet the films depend on the use of and innovation in new media technologies, and much of our viewing pleasure comes from appreciating the craft that has gone into them. We watch entranced by a double magic: the fascination of illusion, and the fascination of how it has been achieved.
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ItemDigital filming and special effects(British Film Institute, 2002)It is curious that digital photography should have spawned a respectable critical literature, while digital cinematography has, as yet, generated very little theoretical work that deals specifically with film. Two possible reasons come to mind. First, digital cinema approaches more closely the culture of animation than lens-based cinematography. And second, the darkroom has always been a key factor in photographic practice, whereas in cinema, postproduction has traditionally been understood as the editing process, rather than the developing and printing of the film strip. I raise this curiosity, which in all likelihood will be a brief and passing phase, only because it raises another conundrum. Traditionally, studies of cinema history have always devoted a chapter to pre-cinematic devices (phenakistoscopes,thaumatropes and so on) and especially to the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey and their contemporaries (the most influential, although now controversial, account is Ceram, 1965). Like other contemporary scholars, I rather distrust this continuity model of cinematic development. The quickest way to describe the difference between chronophotography and cinematography is to point out that the unit ofchronophotography is the still frame, but that of cinema is three frames: the one just past, the current one and the one coming up. Crudely put, chronophotography was an analytical medium: cinema is synthetic. This is why chronophotography rather than cinema became the tool of choice for Taylorism and ‘scientific management’.