Week 14 – Zodiac/Digital Filmmaking

I’ll be honest — a lot of the technical jargon in this week’s readings was pretty incomprehensible to me, but I still feel as if I learned quite a bit. I particularly enjoyed the various examples of digital landscapes that are presented in Stephen Price’s Digital Visual Effects in Cinema, such as the Himalayan mountains of Batman Begins, the Cuban beach of Michael Bay’s seminal Bad Boys II, and the fictional Stark Expo of Iron Man 2. Never before had it occurred to me that these glossy fly-over shots that occur in so many recent movies are not objective portrayals of true landscapes, but rather the digital composites of various sets, models, and actual locations. It was also fascinating to learn of the theory that film is considered a realistic art form due to the objectivity of the photographic image. I particularly liked this portion: “the fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium: the physical objects print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of the light.” This was an interesting thought going into David Fincher’s epic procedural Zodiac and its digital representation of 1970s San Francisco. To me, it was fun to try to determine what aspects of certain shots were digital recreations of the city and which were actual, objective representations. Also, what an incredible film.