Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Gene Youngblood
19891SAST
Pergamon Press plc . Printed in Japan .
0024-094X/89 $3 .00+0 .00
27
28
Youngblood,
IMAGE
TRANSFORMATION
If mechanical cinema is the art of
transition, electronic cinema is the art
of transformation . Film grammar is
based on transitions between fully
formed photographic objects called
frames . It is done primarily through
that collision of frames called the cut,
but also through wipes and dissolves.
In electronic cinema the frame is not
an object but a time segment of a continuous signal . This makes possible a
syntax based on transformation, not
transition . Analog image processing is
one vehicle of this particular art-for
example, scan processors . But it becomes even more significant in digital
image synthesis, where the image is a
database . One can begin to imagine a
movie composed of thousands of
scenes with no cuts, wipes or dissolves,
each image metamorphosing into the
next .
A cut is a cut, but a transforming or
metamorphosing operation is openended. There are infinite possibilities,
each with unlimited emotional and
psychological consequences . Metamorphosis is not unique to digital imaging; it is a familiar strategy in handdrawn animation. What is unique is
the special case of pholoreal metamorphosis . It is one thing for a line drawing or fantasy painting to metamorphose, quite another for a
photographically `real' object to do so .
This is theoretically possible in mechanical cinema and has been prefigured (but never fully realized) in
hand-drawn animation, where it is so
difficult and time consuming that it is,
for all practical purposes, impossible .
It is possible digitally, because the
code allows its to combine the subjectivity of painting, the o'tijectivity of
photography and the gravity-free motion of hand-drawn animation .
Steina points out that there are two
kinds of transitions based on the cut,
and these require different kinds of
metamorphoses. One moves us to a
different point of view in the same
space/time, the other moves us to a
different space and/or time . In flashbacks (cinematic memory), either a
matte is used within the frame or the
whole frame dissolves. With the code,
a part of the frame can metamorphose. This implies an expanded cinematic language of simultaneity .
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