Sophia Milonas, Week 14: Zodiac

As the film industry moves into the digital age and technology advances, it becomes possible to create worlds digitally. This allowed for the emergence of CG environments and realities, filmmakers began using this new technology to put their actors in different settings and to aid them in building whole new worlds and enhancing the one that already exists. The movie Zodiac directed by David Fincher, used this new technology to recreate the city of San Francisco in the 1970s. This new use of technology changed what it meant for viewers to go watch a movie. No longer did people assume that what was happening on screen had once happened in real life. Along with this new assumption came new questions of truth in filmmaking. Who do we trust to tell us the truth? What images are true? Should we assume that we are being told the truth? These questions only get bigger and bigger with the development of technology, the internet and social media. The questioning of truth brings along the implications that what is true (what actually happens in front of the camera) is more valid than what is created with technology. Prince argues in his book Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality that filmmaking should not have been seen as indexical but as world building from the beginning. He points out that in the 1930s and 1940s, most movies were filmed on studio locations, meaning that whatever location they were supposed to be in had to be recreated on a set. This was because camera technology was not yet advanced enough to have a mobile camera. Therefore, the worlds shown on screen that people assumed were ‘real’ were created just as the CG worlds in the digital age are. Both filmmakers in during the studio era and filmmakers during the digital era have to rely on framing, lighting, and editing to make the environment they are filming in look real.