Film and Media in the Digital Age

Media

Film & Media in the Digital Age

Remediation & Convergence

The first section of the paper will explain two terms or concepts within the context of film & media in the digital age: remediation and convergence. These two concepts are quite closely related. Remediation can be when two or more forms of media combine as a new form of media or when one (or more) form of media is reappropriated, altered, or remixed to a point where it is reborn within a new form. Remediation can be the collapse of media into intermedia or multimedia forms, and it can also be changing a media form into another media form. An example of remediation can be when a book is changed into a screenplay, which is then produced into a film. Remediation can be when a book turns into a digitized version of itself and instead of holding a book, a reader can read this same information on an iPad or a Kindle. Remediation may also be when a clip from the film based on the book, is extracted as part of an art installation, and the artist recontextualizes the clip with music or other imagery that has no direct connection to the book or too the film.

Convergence, especially within the digital or information age, is inevitable. There has been substantial evidence of media convergence already, even just within the past twenty years. Media convergence when forms of media, formally separate and distinct, are mashed together or constructed together such that the finished product represents each individual media form with the new form of media. Many filmmakers and film professionals have argued that the digital age has obliterated the idea of and production of a single media form. Consider the following:

Imagine a place without books, photographs, movies, televisions, stereo systems, letters, post cards, billboards, telephones, and fax machines. That place is not Europe in the Dark Ages but the world that most people in the twenty-first century will inhabit. In lieu of the media that we now take for granted there will be the one great digital medium that replaces the current Internet. The process by which all these separate media become digital and come to be delivered via the global network is known as digital convergence. (EMCPP, 2012)

The Internet is a wondrous invention. It is one of the most incredible examples of convergence. The above quotation suggests that within a definite time period, possibly within the lifetimes of people born as far back as the mid 20th century, may see the next form of convergence that will be even greater and better quality than the Internet, as it exists now. This is a mind boggling assertion. Yet, we can see the logic and probability of such an occurrence.

Smart phones have progressed several generations within their short existence. Smart phones are great examples of portable convergence. Most phones can play music, record video, watch movies, take pictures, use the Internet, and use applications that may or may not require the Internet that let users perform post production on the media they have captured with their phones, and much more. Imagine what kind of smart phones will exist by the year 2025, which is not that far ahead. Convergence is a sort of by product of remediation. "Media convergence brings together the "three Cs" -- computing, communications, and content." (Encyclopedia Brittanica, 2012) In the many iterations of remediation, some remediations become popular and produced repeatedly to the point where they become normative, such as text and graphic effects on news broadcasts. Modern viewers may perceive a news broadcast as cheap or too simple without motion graphics, logos, and text streaming along the sides of the frame. Such items were not recorded or created at the same time as the broadcast. The broadcast aired on the news is a product of remediation, brought to viewers as a from of convergence, which they have now come to expect.

Section 2 -- Digitization, Editing, and Diversity of Devices

Digitization is a process by which media or information capture by nondigital means are transformed into digital information such that this media or information can now be treated like any other form of digital information.

To a computer, not much. Properly transformed, each of these items is to a computer simply a collection of 1s and 0s. Through the magic of sampling (the process of choosing discrete parts to represent a continuous whole), almost anything -- text, sound, speech, film, graphics, animations, music -- can be digitized, and whatever can be digitized can be presented on a computer and transmitted over a network. (EMCPP "Digital Convergence" 2012)

Digitization allows for many processes and changes to the original media form. (Pavlik Media in the Digital Age 2008) Digitization is the process by which films shot on 35mm film can be edited with nonlinear editing software such as Avid and Final Cut Pro. The machine that conducts this process from film to bytes is called a telecine, so that the film now has a digital intermediate. The film, once a physical entity, is has now been remediated such that it is now a digital file, existing as information, that can be manipulated with a very fine toothed comb, in the form of editing software.

A simpler form of digitization can be conceptualized as a person taking a picture of a painting with a digital camera. The painting once (and presumably still does) existed as a painting in the three dimensional world, and once digitized, the painting can exist in many different situations than it would hanging quietly in a museum. The painting can be transferred to a diversity of devices and edited as part of a strategy for remediation or convergence.

Editing is the ability to create continuity, narrative, and perspective with juxtaposition. With respect to film and many forms of visual media, editing is done with software on computers. It is no longer the typical practice to editing physically, though, there are still many photographers out there with dark rooms, and some filmmakers that still have functioning Steinbecks to actually cut their films as was the tradition for most of film history thus far. Editing is an extremely creative and technical practice that is the last stage of production for a film or piece of visual media.

Because of advances in technology and experiments in remediation, editing has become much more specialized than in previous periods. (Dargis The New York Times 2010) Editing can be done in teams with certain editors as department heads. There are sound editors, dialogue editors, foley editors, music editors, and the more commonly known (general) editors. Even sound effects, many kinds of special effects such as those found in film like The Matrix, and color manipulations can now be done by individual editors. This is a reason why some filmmakers and critics contend that there are no more "pure" films and the modern motion picture is a convergence of various media forms edited together to create (hopefully) a seamless and combination of images & sounds that if done well, most non-savvy audience members will not even notice. (Pyudik Examiner 2010)