3k 4k 5k and Beyond

After 27 years on the road as a DP I recently took up a Creative Research Fellowship in High Definition Imaging at Bristol University. There are two strands to my research i) to look at the effect of various resolutions on perception through making and exhibiting HD installations and ii) creating a resource for future researchers of video interviews on HDV of the thoughts of those people working in the higher reaches of HD at this point in time.

So I’ve just been in the USA doing some interviews with people who are across the HD medium in an interesting way. Some of the people interviewed were just back from this years NAB, at which Red have announced 3k and 5k cameras besides their Red One which is notionally 4k (most industry people who’ve tested it believe it to be about 2.7K but I’ve also heard that it is as low res at about 1.8 k). So how does the Red fit in to our future and does the technical stuff really matter ? Read on.

Part of my research at Bristol University is to find out what the affect of high resolution images are on humans as we develop and tailor this new technology to our needs. I have some evidence from a recent installation that increased resolution can confuse the viewer as to what is real and what is not – but this is just the beginning of this new medium.

Remediation is a word that describes what a new medium does by copying the effects of the preceding medium for a while, whilst it’s finding its feet. Still life painting morphed into still life photography and the fledgling medium had to deal with older ways of thinking. HD Cinematography has the mindsets of three prior mediums to deal with – film, analogue video and early digital video.

So for this next work I decided to re-shoot a scene made famous by Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley which he captured through his exquisite Black and White images. This was not a gesture towards the idea of remediation – a form of copying - it was in fact about exploring something I’d noticed as I slowly get my eye into shape. In short my installation investigated at what level of resolution do people confuse real and projected reality. It turned out that images shot with 960 pixel AG HVX200 up-rezzed to 1080i create an interesting level of confusion with some projected plates of food and some real white plates placed in the projected plates location.

In this new strand of work I want to re-shoot those places that have been over shot to saturation to try to find something about what higher resolutions might say in addition to the iconography of the image, to try to photographically unveil some new truth about the location.

I hired a Red from Chater Cameras in Berkely after being directed to them by Art Adams, a well-known Bay Area Director of Photography who as it happens was only a week behind me in terms of doing a serious shoot with Red. Originally I’d posted on CML to try find a reputable source for a Red but apart from one in LA from Dale Launer (just a little too far from Yosemite) I mostly attracted some very dubious email correspondence from people who you just knew had no idea about the kit they were hiring out and certainly no back up. Chater had two bodies – that’s basic if you’re hiring. They also had the lenses I needed – you need serious glass with a Red. Also John Chater is a Scott and we like Scottish people don’t we.

I wanted an extremely long and detailed zoom out of the Bridal Veil Waterfall to slowly but surely increase detail, depth and definition until the viewer is completely overawed with the shot. This would be the kind of awe you get from An Ansel Adams photograph, but with the addition of the ‘reveal’ which of course the single image photographer was restricted from doing by their medium. My reveal also begins with a long slow digital zoom from the pixels of the image which displayed the water within the fall itself which was then picked up after it had zoomed out to 4k by the analogue lens zoom from tight on telephoto then out to wide shot.

Chater recommended Jeremy Long as a good AC familiar with the Red sufficiently to get the thing working and eventually downloading the data to laptop. I have to say, when you work with the kit it’s a fairly simple operational procedure – but with all of these things you need to get to touch the stuff in the first case – that’s why AC’s prep so much. The camera came from Berkeley to Yosemite after a 4 hour drive so if anything failed we were not going to be able to solve it – it would be a do-or-die shoot.

I realised I needed some good glass on the front of the camera in 4k mode so I asked John for his suggestions and we came up eventually with 24 – 290 Angeniux Optimo zoom that you can see in the picture – its not for the faint hearted. There’s a 6 inch Chroziel matte box on the front holding 4 bits of glass in front of the lens to ND the shot down to the right stop plus some atmosphere cutting glass as well as some sky ND Grad. Are grads dangerous on zooms? Only if you use them wrongly. As it happens I’m adding more and more grads into the mix these days to induce light control all around the lens. The 6 inch matte box is mandatory for proper HD shooting also - so the lightweight camera begins to get very heavy indeed.

So before I press record for the first time I’m standing at Tunnel View looking at the scene and wondering about exposure or at least some kind of placement on the latitude curve with a hubbub of people around me. I take out the light meter and take a reading at 320 ASA (and the Red is balanced at 5000k by the way – near daylight - I've begun to like this colour temperature a lot more recently as it actually reflects what my eyes are really seeing).As for 320 ASA, I think this is the correct 'exposure' for the current build.

In film we think of an Fstop (or Tstop) as a location on the exposure gradient and at the same time keep in mind that unlike video which was so damn critical in terms of exposure (don’t get it wrong basically – just like reversal film) – that all exposure values were in fact a relative judgement. We placed ourselves on an exposure curve and used experience to make an artistic choice about the representation of reality that we saw in front of us and in that choice induced atmosphere and hopefully the suspension of disbelief for the audience.

This gained an auteur kind of respect in the industry as we the cinematographers ‘painted with light’. I shan’t take that statement apart except to raise a doubt about what some people would prefer to maintain as an ‘artistic’ idea when in fact most DP’s use quite prosaic colour values to paint their ‘paintings’ - Like in any other practice, it's only the special ones with 'the touch' that make superlative work.

Many DP's simply use obvious colour ideas – warm looks make you feel comfortable with what’s going on, cold looks make you feel blue and alienated – etc. Conrad Hall and Vitorrio Storraro took two different approaches to the problem of conventional understandings and forged their own path in colour and exposure to widen the palette of the less talented people. We all owe them a great debt of gratitude for taking the risks they did and dragging the commercial folks along with them.

In video we had to play a slightly different game using all kinds of tricks to pull off the ‘dirtying of the look’ to generate some kind of organic feel in a clinically clean medium. In video I used to do all my work in camera and not abrogate my responsibility to the grader to work a thin patina of look over the footage. In film I lived on the edge of exposure – sometimes getting it wrong of course, but always knowing that as a head of BBC natural History once said – ‘we send people out with film cameras as opposed to video cameras because even a monkey can get something by spinning the dial’. That’s a telling statement, not because film is easy, but rather because that’s where the skill comes in – to get it ‘right’.

So it's said that a camera like the Red One has latitude for say 13 - 14 stops: 27 years ago I paid £500 to attend a workshop of a name cinematographer to try to learn how to expose film for low light. The cinematographer had specialised for his career in low ASA film and costume drama and was know for the excessive use of light. I asked him how to work at the low end and he didn’t understand my question – which was good because he relayed to me that I was thinking in the wrong way. There is no such thing as correct exposure, just a choice about where you place your exposure on the latitude gradient. So I paid my $1000 for that one piece of information: “Think Differently’.

So for absoulteley nothing I’ll pass this on to you: ‘Think Differently’ from now on about exposing electronic cinematography (that’s what I’ll now be calling it by the way, because that’s what I accept that it’s now legitimately become).

With all the above coming in to my mind as a dawning realisation started to take shape which I’ll talk about ina little while, I rated the camera at 320 ASA for rec 709 and measured 16 in the shadows and 45 in the highlights. The sweet spot on the lens was between 5.8 and 8 so I offered up a 2 stop polarising filter, a .3 or .6 of ND depending on the lowering or general lift of light, a .3 ND grad to obtain more of the clouds and a stop of 5.6 (and a half) to place the whole image on the place in the gradient to realise the way I want to see what was before me then, once again. There’s nothing special about the above calculation – it’s a straightforward safety net.

So I shot and Jeremy then downloaded the data from both Flash Cards and the 320 gig Red Drive. To demystify this process, one thing to keep in mind is that if you change speed or resolution on the camera you have to reformat the flash card or drive before recording. This means you push a card into the slot, set the settings and record, format it, shoot for 4 minutes, take out the card, put it into a cheap flash card reader through a USB connector on the mac and it mounts as a drive and you drag off the footage. Easy. If you use the Red Drive you just firewire it into the laptop and do the same thing. (why did red make their cards proprietory and therefore expensive ???? and has anyone hacked this yet or am I missing something? Forward apologies if I am). Scott Billups told me he’d shot an entire movie with 4 cards using them in 8 minute pairs (16 minutes at 2K). He’d enjoyed this as it had made the whole team feel like they were back on ten minute magazines. (Keep in mind you have around 160 minutes on the red 320 gig drive).

You then open RedCine to watch the files (at a quarter resolution on a 5400rpm portable drive which still blew everyone away that watches the shot - and a quarter resolution on my 1920x1080 laptop screen meant one thirty second resolution of the actual data as far as I can work out) or import at 2k into final cut. You can use a cropped 4k (4000 pixels not 4098 if you use Cienform’s Neo4k utilities for Final Cut). You switch to log and transfer then import though redcode. In Redcine you have to choose whether to watch in Red Log or Rec 709 (or various other routes). If you value the camera at 320 ASA it will look ok in Rec 709 or dark in Red Log as it should be rated then at 180 ASA. There’s a whole set of arguments about which to use – this is one to study up on but Rec 709 is good for TV, Redcode for cinema. Everyone can have a good argument about this subject the more that gets ‘properly’ shot. Also, with information like that above, don’t try and learn it – it’s too hard just through the mind. You’ll understand in a few minutes if you get the programme and press a few buttons. (I do love this about Red software by the way - no instructions, you just work it out as it's all self explanatory).

I found the process easy and even though every take I did was watched by a large crowd (put a movie camera at Tunnel View in Yosemite and even though the view is one of the most stunning on earth – gadgets still win out). In fact with all of Yosemite valley there before them, those who watched the shot slowly emerge on the RED LCD (no Viewfinder yet but the LCD is good in daylight) there were still ooh’s and ahhh’s a plenty.

Back in San Francisco and I had to reflect on what I was being told by those contemporary practitioners and users of very high level HD that I was interviewing: I’ve discovered that there are other questions to ask besides those that easily come to mind. For instance questions about where we’re going in terms of resolution are not necessarily of much import – does it really matter if the military are working with 64K? Even if that’s where we’ll be going commercially eventually and that’s what we electronic workers will be using at some point – sooner rather than later. Whether a question like this matters or not is about the state of mind you’re used to being in and what other states of mind may be relevant to the way the future will unfold.

As I go along asking the questions that have arisen through my own exposure to HD, then in using a camera like the Red One for instance one has to ask the question: does this line up with expectations generated by strong advertising messages from Jim Jannard and his team. In fact my recent use of Red is generating a new level of realisation about what is going on with HD which has grown out a part of my own intellectual terrain that I thought I had shut the gate and thrown away the key on. This is film thinking, a slightly overgrown garden which still has its fascinations and secret places. Right now I’ve thrown that gate open again and I’m clearing away the undergrowth with a high level of enthusiasm. That’s the end of that metaphor ! And here’s another:

I’m now feeling liberated finally. I’ve talked to highly professional people who are quite anxious about what is going on, but through experience I feel like ten years of climbing has brought me to the top of the cliff and has allowed me a view across the Mesa. I now realise we’ve been working in the canyons thinking that this is our terrain – but actually, the truth is that we have to inhabit an entirely different terrain completely to understand and use HD as it is now re-forming itself technologically. In fact HD as we have come to know it is dead.

Like taking on Einstein’s general law of relativity our minds need a re-boot and a re-think about what we’re actually looking at to begin to understand the High Resolution world as it now is. We are truly into the next generation of thinking about how we achieve our goal which is of course to make images that completely blow the audience away and so make images that enable the audience to performatively enter the space that the image is creating. I mean here that the images we create are immersive in its truest sense – that we plunge in and inhabit the space the image creates – with compulsion and agreement.

So here’s the rub. Electronic Cinematography is a description of a raw data flow where the data holds a latent image – just like the photo-chemical process of film held a latent image. It was latent until the development process released the image partially. I say partially as there were other processes where the image could be affected in a material way – bypassing the bleaching of silver from the negative was one such process that comes to mind – the now over-used bleach bypass process. This would have been an innovation in its time where the cinematographer would have asked the lab to do something that was until then unheard of.

Contemporary electronic cinematography would have it that you leave certain of the cinematographic responsibilities to post to fix it. To my eye this simply casts a thin patina of colour over the image for the discerning eye to be annoyed at. This is a hang over from the early days before the RAW data period, the days of compression, with its desperately awful solutions like Gop images which still fuel low end sub HD formats like HDV and low sampling and throwing away much of the camera head data and all the rest of the processes used to render an electronic image - this is basically now bad information.

So what’s really important here is the latent nature of the RAW data image and as with film there are some interesting things we can do that are akin to the idea of heating the developer and bypassing the bleach ! With RAW data I intuitively feel that you don’t just leave this to post to fix the image. The issue now is that just like film you can affect the ‘materiality’ of the image.

In the past in film cinematographers had clean stock and even sharper lenses and the aim of their job was to make an atmospheric image to carry the audience deeply into the story. So they realised that you should over or under expose – mess around with the temperatures of the various baths that unleashed the latent image until a change was made that revealed an image that was to the taste and aesthetic of the director of photography. Now we are at that moment where you really can do that with Raw data. The image in front of you can be recorded, imprinted in Data form and a latent image will exist until the ‘development’ of that image. Of course, here’s where the bright imaginative ones can come along and innovate ways of dealing with the metaphor so that real and substantial changes are affected in the images we see derived in the digital realm.

I have no doubt of the above – every bell I have is ringing to tell me that I am ‘warm, warm, warm’ as children say, in the game of positioning yourself near the goal to take the prize. Since shooting on the Red I realise that some people are going to have no idea at all what to do with what my intuition was telling me at Tunnel View in Yosemite.

When I see the shot again in its two dimensional form I want to see its essence as it occurred to me at the moment where I looked at the vast scene in front of me and in a zen-like way regarded the scene as I imagined Ansel Adams would have looked at the landscape.

The man had a zone system to measure exposure, to find a way of systematizing the process so that it worked each time he used it. But it was in the end an intuitive zone system. When I’m lighting a room or space I turn off my beta functions and shut my mind down so that the wide vision aspect of my seeing can come to the fore. By ‘widevision’ I mean in this sense a more reflective state of mind and therefore a more meditative view.

So when I stepped back from the precipice at Tunnel View with my light meter in my hand and my equations about filters come to a conclusion about what’s a good place on the lens, what other filters might I introduce – all that technical stuff and have to plump on an F stop that in some way is a measure of an irony – that there is a set of learned outcomes that act as confirmation that I should ignore all the set of learned outcomes one has accumulated to be able to cope with life – or expose a shot as it’s commonly known.

Anyone who’s exposed a foot of film will understand the previous description and this is the place we have to go to in digital cinema, together with willing accomplices from post-production data handling who can see that this may be a way forward. What I’m proposing here is a relationship between production and post-production that is simply there to bring this latent electrical image out into the open in a qualitative way.

In that little equation lay a route where people can travel to create images that are transcendent of the values of the first period of intensive look-creation from the industry. What we’ll see is subtleties of colour and resolution that haven’t been seen before. Images that are in their own way as qualitative as those derived though releasing the latent image in the film domain. I showed my teenage kids the proxy files and both commented separately that they sort of looked like CGI. This is significant because it is a realisation that something is going on that they can relate to – something that means something in a way that previous digital HD work didn’t.

A note on resolution and for this I'll take a metaphor up front: If a standard lens of a format is the one that when put in front of the eye does not change its magnification one way or the other (in other words neither gets smaller nor bigger but stays exactly the same), then I would content that our eyes tend to function at 'standard resolution'. WHat I mean by that is that when we focus on something we select the thing to look at and then bring to bare on that thing two elements: increased focus and increased resolution. By these means we separate the object for scrutiny. What this idea brings up is that we have the capacity to incrementally increase certain visual and mental functions - unlike camera optics which have to be set and relay information in a way the DP chooses to get at the essence of the thing he or she is trying to say something about on a narrative level. I haven't really completely thought this idea through - but I find it exciting that our 'sensorium' the set of senses and the sense common to all, the mind, are available in an incredibly subtle way to the experiencer.

Besides incredible resolution, what I haven’t said so far about my experience manipulating the raw data within RedCine and RedAlert (free programmes for exporting Red raw files) is that within these simple little programmes I’ve seen looks from within the footage that will completely blow people away. That are ‘different’ from what I’ve seen before – that are so, so much subtler, delicate, resolved, softer, in fact just better. The colour ranges are subtle enough to be sufficient for artistic work to occur.

All we need to do now is embrace the medium fully. I look forward to trying out the Arri 3k and the Dalsa 4k, the Red 3k and 5k to see if their images match, or better the Red 4k. Also, I expect Apple didn't show up at the 2008 NAB because they're re-defining final cut to be resolution independent - if that happens, then truly, what was latterly known as HD or 1920x1080 will be truly dead.

Addendum to the premier of 14 History Lessons

I premiered my work 14 History Lessons, 18, Visions, 21 Beatification in January, then on 14th March I re-screened it with the modifications in place suggested by the audience reaction from the first screening. After the discussion last friday, a friend who is also an artist within digital media suggested that although I'd spent 18 years trying to integrate various elements into a linear timeline (actually 20 if you go back to when the original inspiration came for the work) perhaps the problem of the work lay in this attempt at integration and that perhaps all the elements would work together more easily or sympathetically to each other and to the audiences experience, if I separated them !

That's my exclamation mark. 20 years work is not a light undertaking. But I am now committed to finding out how a piece of work functions for an audience regardless of the cost to myself. Last year I worked with Robert Cahen. I sat with him operating an edit suite so that he might make a piece of work entitled Blind Song which he was making for the Blink project (links on the side). Robert had previously made a piece which only I and Sandra Lischi, a professor of Digital Art at Pisa University had liked - more than liked, were excited by. However, the majority of viewers had not liked the piece as it re-evoked a use of classical music juxtaposed with its antithesis in terms of image - this technique being prevalent 40 years ago and exemplified by Stanley Kubrik in 2001 a Space Odyssey. Robert understood that Sandra and I were ahead of the wave in accepting this juxtaposition but that it was important for an artist to know where his or her audience were at.

So my 70 minute piece will be broken up into several sound and image streams and become not only a linear work but also an installation. Unlike In Other People's SKins which is simple and pure, 14 History Lessons is mightily complex. It was begun after all, when I was 20 years younger, before I had learned my lessons (spoken about in the previous blog) made at a time when I had a tendency towards the portentous. So given what I know I'm in the position of having to nurse a less that ideal work into the level that I now understand to be important to work at. It might be argued that I should leave this alone and let history judge it but the motives I had to finish this work are still with me so as an experiment I shall continue on in the hope of re-engineering the work to my current level. We'll see.

Trying to write my own name

In Other People’s Skins has now been put up at Gloucester Cathedral. I’m amazed at the visitor comments for this piece because I’ve never seen such glowing comments about an artwork before (mine or others). My initial fears that the work would simply function on the smoke and mirrors level (that people would simply enjoy the ‘functionality’ of the work) has proved unfounded. It seems that people are actually ‘getting it’.

So this tells me something that I also regard as amazing: In Other People’s Skins is a signature work. What this means is that I have learnt a certain level of ‘craft’ in my art, enough to make a work that people can relate to strongly. The danger of the signature work is that it becomes what you are known for and which you can never better.

Earlier today I was thinking of other artists that I know whose engagement with their chosen medium (primarily digital) is still hampered by its technical elements. I’ve been working in video, both analogue and digital for a long time now; I’ve made a lot of work, both linear and latterly installation in form – I regard the definition ‘signature work’ as being a piece of work that somehow is imbued with the answer to the basic enquiry the artist is making. That doesn’t mean to say that I the artist, understand that answer, but rather that the glimmerings of an understanding are lighting the dark.

My use of the word craft, above, is about knowing enough of the technicalities of the medium, enough about the potential audience response from the use of those technicalities and enough about the mystery of art to create works which fulfil certain requirements of a ‘work of art’. The mystery is of course that an artwork should have space within it for the audience to import personal meaning and significance whilst at the same time carrying the resonance of what the artist was originally inspired by.

Subject matter can only really be one thing: that which makes us self-consciously aware or what we truly are. What we truly are, is ever changing, yet ever the same.

Anyway, my understanding has grown through making and exhibiting In Other People’s Skins (IOPS) and I hope that that understanding grows the more it is exhibited. On that point I’ve had a few enquiries asking for it to be shown at other cathedrals and maybe some in the US.

What this does is arms me when I make my next installation – on that note I have six to make, exhibit and report on, by the end of September. This gets really interesting for me because all six will absolutely not use any ‘engaging tactic’. For instance, in IOPS people get to place their hands in the image of others hands, or maybe move a plate when they feel it’s miss-aligned with the virtual image of the plate. Somehow I have to make artworks that use whatever fascinates the individual as a means of bringing them in to the essence of the work.

We know that everyone is different and has different meaning structures inside them so therefore the only thing to do is use whatever lies beneath and is the motive power of meaning structure and its corollary, significance. We might argue about that sentence: it could be that actually significance precedes meaning structure – I don’t know at this point – it might even be that one accompanies the other. But, what lies beneath either or both these ideas is the species base, the bit that got us out of the trees and standing upright. So as an artist I’m realising that I have to allow that to flow through me as it’s pretty clear to me that I as a thinker am limited by my own thought process. Here we go, we’re unavoidably into ‘the mystery’.

In a recent work I had some fun having found some old footage of me trying to phone someone with the phone set up to record the other end of the conversation. I remembered being on a documentary and flying Noam Chomsky over to our office in Great Russell street. I was introduced to the great man and said, ‘hello Noam’, with a degree of ignorance of his intellectual weight and reputation, I didn’t say anything else to him except the odd quip from behind the camera as my friend Renny interviewed him. In the recent work I put some text over the footage from 1977 which ended with me giving up and not getting through to the person I was ringing. The text said: ‘Trying to talk to Noam Chomsky’, a little joke to myself about a missed opportunity. As the piece went on I rang other people who I also didn’t get through to. Quite quickly I introduced people that were no longer alive, Bertolt Brecht, Plotinus and Hildegard of Bingen was one of them. I ended up trying to ring ‘the first person who stood upright’. These interstitial elements lightened what was quite a portentous piece.

That’s a circuitous way of getting to a woman who wrote music, poetry, painted and had sexual union with Christ – regularly. Hildegard not only knew the mystery, she was a part of it.

And it came to pass ... when I was 42 years and 7 months old, that the heavens were opened and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kindled my whole heart and breast like a flame, not burning but warming... and suddenly I understood of the meaning of expositions of the books...

Hildegard then did what committed artists do in some way, shape, or form:

But although I heard and saw these things, because of doubt and low opinion of myself and because of diverse sayings of men, I refused for a long time a call to write, not out of stubbornness but out of humility, until weighed down by a scourge of god, I fell onto a bed of sickness.

Today artists aren’t required to have the ‘modesty’ gene that Hildegard had, and a lot of stuff that is presented as ‘art’ is neurotic as opposed to enlightened. ‘Mystery’ is one of the things that art is about and I find of course, that this cannot be described except by circumlocution. From the artists point of view the act of making art is to try to realize truth in some way, to convert oneself from the vessel governed by ego, to one governed by a more enlightened state. The use of the word ‘work’ in the phrase ‘work of art’ is not only a noun but also a verb. As the artist works, so they work on themselves trying to release the form that is hidden within themselves – they sculpt themselves. The urge comes to create, the inspiration comes for the work and then the artist through the truth of their practice places the inspiration in the work and through the exhibiting of the work the audience receives the ‘transmission’ of the inspiration – that is the artwork. If the artwork is fashioned with craft garnered from both talent and developed through experience then that transmission has the suitable space within it for the audience to create it’s own meaning as well as absorbing what the artist has to say.

So: I recognize that I’ve made a signature piece which is a marker along my route as a developing artist, for which I’m very thankful. Now, as I turn my attention to other works which I have to raise up to this level, I find myself having to become clearer about what I’m doing as an artist, more impervious to my own tendency to obfuscate through my own clouding mechanisms, I have to eliminate sentimentality towards my ego self so that my artist self is unencumbered by the neurotic elements of human existence.

Curiously, the thought of leaving my ego behind makes me feel free.

HD in the 12th Century BC

Whilst crawling across the floor in the void that lay above a 15th century ceiling, disturbing dust that had lain dormant for many a long year, that might possibly have lime in it and being conscious of not wearing a mask, I found myself reflecting on the nature of being an artist in this digital age.

What I was looking for was a one and a half inch hole through which I might suspend a projector over the floor below. Whilst in the chapel I’d noticed that above us there were many curves in the ceiling. Initially I’d been looking for points to attach holding points to. I’d already been told that I wasn’t allowed to either place my light proof tent in the space, nor attach anything to anywhere in the cathedral. This is the usual conundrum that confronts us: ‘you may not place your work here, no, not anywhere, not anything doing’ apart from that, all else is possible. But then of course we have to get creative and solve the problem. This is a factor shared with all technicians and their practice too. It’s what keeps them going and interested – the solving of problems.

But as a 21st century artist who’s had an idea for an artwork I find myself joking with friends that the idea is a minor part of the exercise, the accomplishing of the exhibition of that idea is what takes up 90 per cent of one’s attention after the fact of making the piece.

So, in the now dusty atmosphere I peered through the hole in the ceiling and saw the person I had left below standing peering up at me. I dangled a cable through the hole and miraculously it was large enough to allow the big connector on the end to go through. Before, on dangling a tape measure through the hole we established that the floor below lay 22 feet beneath and that the ceiling lay 2 feet beneath where I was standing, being two feet thick. Three of us eventually stood on that spot, therefore establishing that the ceiling could take probably twice that weight – or even more, after all, it didn’t collapse, so a projector’s weight should be ok.

I started to think about how I might suspend a projector through this hole. A tropid maybe, dangling two cables so that the projector neither spin around nor took on a swinging pendulum movement ? But then that would not spread the load. It was suggested then that we make a metal square made of thick rod about 30 inches in width to be the base, then simply put a winch over that about 12 inches higher up but attached to the square – one of the biggest problems with the tent was the weight of lifting the projector and cage – so a winch would allow us to load up the projector, speakers, mains, connectors etc on the ground and on a signal to those above, simply have it winched it up into position.

On being at home I realised that I needed to commission the making of the base plate and winch. Who to ring? Perhaps a company in a nearby city that would charge according to the perceived complexity of the solution might be the answer – Then I started thinking: who would have the appropriate technology ? Perhaps the nearby blacksmith’s forge?

I drove down to the forge and talked to the men there, men that could have been doing what they were now doing, since quite soon after the invention of the manipulation of iron. They looked at the drawings, suggested some improvements and they’re now working on the unit.

When I first came to the part of Somerset I now live in, I happened to be in a café with my five year old, Phoebe. She went up to an old man who sat drinking a cup of and asked him his name. He replied that he was called Nathaniel. He asked her what her name might be and where she lived, she told him. He then told her that his great-great grandfather had visited the forge in my village and that the blacksmith had told him of his great-great grandfathers involvement in the Monmouth rebellion in 1685.

In our combined living memory we had established a link from 300 or more years ago. The forge in my village will now solve my current digital problems - So there in that void I had found myself within the echo of the 15th century, imagining a 21st century work with a problem that had a solution from the 12th century BC.

The Modular Transfer Function and (Imagined) Reality

I’m going to try to describe an important insight I’ve had into digitality. Loosely, the outcome of this insight has a simple end result: In describing the resolution of an image using terms derived from the analogue realm we are missing a crucial element. That element equates to looking at a landscape on a bright sunny day through a fog. That digital fog is described at the end of what follows.

The further you delve into a subject, the more you learn of course, but there’s a sense in which the width of your enquiry widens, the deeper you go. Visualize an iceberg and the tip that sits above sea level is what one might know, generally from day to day. Beneath the surface is the rest of the enquiry – both known and unknown to oneself. But as the journey of discovery goes on you find other relationships between what you have known and what you come to understand as important about your subject.

I am not a mathematician yet my enquiry about High Definition keeps indicating the importance of mathematics in terms of the deep understanding of the subject. Here I’m talking about a Newtonian world view in which you understand why this or that function happens – because it is dependent perhaps on a set of causes and effects – that’s why I’m using the term Newtonian – as opposed to Euclidian or to bring it up to date, Einsteinian.

The thing about the cogs and ratchets of reality is that as we enquire into the meaning function they represent, they actually tell us about a quantum world and do not necessarily tell us about the significance of things at a non-quantum level.

So there’s a problem about going deeply into your subject – you start to disassociate from reality as it is lived.

Mathematics is useful if you can bring its insights back to the 'surface'.

Film, using a description that is based on an understanding that is prior to analogue descriptions could be said to be 'alchemical'. A description of reality based upon 'Digital data technology' now speaks to us. Recombined elements that rely on signal values, though emulating what we believe we know about or own signal processor, the brain, is a best guess scenario – we don’t actually know how we interface with the brain, the common sense to all our other senses. A philosopher might say that we actually do not know and cannot know anything at all.

But I’m not a philosopher; in the end I’m a mystic – someone that actually believes in the reality of inner knowledge – through design you might say. I believe in in-tuition, in-spiration in-dependence, inner-revelation, in-sight.

I have always intuitively known about system noise. Any analogue system has system noise. Turn the volume up on an amplifier and speaker and you’ll hear hiss and hum, the former known as white noise. Any system has the effect of itself standing by to perform as an integral element of its performance. The signal to noise ratio of the system – that is how much noise the system generates from just being – is a definition of its efficiency. There is generally more noise in a cheap system than an expensive one because better components are used in the expensive system (though this is not always true of course).

Digital systems are different though. Analogue systems use their own elemental characteristics to reproduce sounds or images; digital systems use the neutral form of data description to represent sounds and images. What I mean here is that the analogue realm is analogous to the world it describes – it tries to imitate using what it is made of. Vibrations gathered at a mike are sent through a set of mathematical algorithms that try to imitate the original then output through the reverse of the original gathering unit (the mike, the speaker). Though digital systems use the same front and end bits, as son as the signal is gathered it is rendered into a set of values that seek to reduce the essential nature of the original to a mathematical description. As I have illustrated elsewhere to this article, up until recently they have inherited the prior analogue mathematics to do the work – that of Fourier’s discrete cosine transform. Only now are we moving on into Fourier’s Wavelet Transforms that are more sympathetic to what the digital realm essentially is.

Digits work best in describing life, as it is if they rise and fall in an analogue way. That’s difficult if you are essentially a packet of data. You’re either there or not there, whereas analogue increases then falls in a manner sympathetic to the way out senses apprehend the world. Imagine a train whistles in the distance approaching us, shifting pitch as it passes then fading away. Pure analogue response uses the medium of air to transmit through.

Fourier’s wavelet transform organizes data in a way that is analogous to the analogue approach. Quite simply it is a more intelligent use of the digital form.

I was reading more deeply about the way in which we make comparisons and judgments about resolution. The old analogue system used pairs of black and white lines of equal width in smaller and smaller widths to understand how much resolution was reproducible by a system. If we said a TV system had 800 lines resolution we were saying that above 800 lines you witness a blur, below 800 lines you could distinguish white and black lines. It was quite simple in the old days.

Now we understand something a little different about systems and resolution. I’m going to quote from Norman Koren’s excellent article on Modular Transfer Function at http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF.html. Please bare with this as if you don’t understand this sort of stuff and don’t ever want to understand this sort of stuff, the language itself says something about the study:

Systems for reproducing information, images, or sound typically consist of a chain of components. For example, audio reproduction systems consist of a microphone, mike preamp, digitizer or cutting stylus, CD player or phono cartridge, amplifier, and loudspeaker. Film imaging systems consist of a lens, film, developer, scanner, image editor, and printer (for digital prints) or lens, film, developer, enlarging lens, and paper (for traditional darkroom prints). Digital camera-based imaging systems consist of a lens, digital image sensor, de-mosaicing program, image editor, and printer. Each of these components has a characteristic frequency response; Modular Transfer Function is merely its name in photography. The beauty of working in frequency domain is that the response of the entire system (or group of components) can be calculated by multiplying the responses of each component.

The response of a component or system to a signal in time or space can be calculated by the following procedure: i) Convert the signal into the frequency domain using a mathematical operation known as the Fourier transform, which is fast and easy to perform on modern computers using the FFT ( Fast Fourier Transform) algorithm. The result of the transform is called the frequency components or FFT of the signal. Images differ from time functions like sound in that they are two-dimensional. Film has the same MTF in any direction, but not lenses. (ii) Multiply the frequency components of the signal by the frequency response (or MTF) of the component or system. (iii) Inverse transform the signal back into time or spatial domain. Doing this in time or spatial domain requires a cumbersome mathematical operation called convolution. If you try it, you'll know how the word "convoluted" originated. And you'll know for sure why frequency domain is widely appreciated.

What Norman Koren is talking about here is the way in which what we used to call system noise has its digital counterpart. Look at the picture at the front of this article. You’ll see a series of lines both black and white – that’s the ideal. Look at the picture at the end of this article. It has a series of line both black and white sitting on a field of grey. As the lines become thinner (therefore requiring more resolution) they decrease in contrast until they merge in to the background because the system itself has a limit on what contrast it can represent. As Norman describes above “the response of the entire system (or group of components) can be calculated by multiplying the responses of each component”.

I want to revisit the paragraph I wrote at the head of this article to bring this insight into focus: The further you delve into a subject, the more you learn of course, but there’s a sense in which the width of your enquiry widens, the deeper you go.”

The simple insight into the deterioration of resolution as its representation lessens in terms of frequency (use the metaphor of lessening of contrast to understand this) now powers along my enquiry and gives me inspiration and the resilience to continue. Using the metaphor at the head of the article: That element equates to looking at a landscape on a bright sunny day through a fog. So the grey background to the lines of resolution that deteriorate into grey from their prior black and white state is the fog I was talking about. As with all metaphors they only point at the situation and do not fully describe it - but they are helpful.

That other metaphor which like all statements of 'fact' is as much a metaphor as that of fog - simply a way of getting at the 'truth' of a situation. The description of the Modular Transfer Function has brought Fourier into my field of vision yet again and this alone tells me that at some point the revelation that is waiting concerning the actual nature of digitality is waiting to reveal itself. It’s just a question of taking a deep enough breath of air before diving ever deeper into the subject so that one remembers what one is diving for.

Playing with Light

I’m an English DP and have been lighting since 1980. When I first took up the craft I was privileged to be in the middle of Soho in London catering for a blossoming TV trade – it became important to learn the skills of lighting. Many years later, after numerous commercials, promos, TV dramas and four feature films I try to give back what I’ve learnt to the industry via teaching the incoming trainees that now flood into every educational institution around the world: Let’s face it, making moving images is the new rock and roll.

As a DP sometimes there’s a challenge to try to think outside the box to solve a lighting challenge – usually due to budget. Some years ago a friend of mine was directing music show for Channel 4 and his DP was about to be fired because he’d been asked to light the set low key but to keep any presenters or acts lit high key. Work it out – anyway that blew his fuse and he retired. I got the call and said of course I could solve the issue. Then I sat down and started musing on the problem. After puzzling over it for a couple of days, suddenly a solution came to mind: fortunately for me I’d seen a documentary on Cuban cinema a couple of months before. They didn’t have many lights available in Cuba at the time and so they took to carrying them around on the ends of booms so that when people moved the light moved with them.

That’s when I invented the ‘Ned Kelly’. I asked my partner who is an art director to make up a chicken wire cylinder about 15 inches high by about 10 inches in diameter. I cut out a slot about 8 by 10 at the front and put two layers of frost there, then coated the rest in black wrap. I hung a 1k total lamp at the back shining through the frost and hung the whole thing off a barracuda pole or polecat.The English sparks weren’t too keen on a job where they get to carry poles around with lights on the end, but after a while everyone warmed to the task and we got a low key show with high key presenters. I mention this here because this article is about invention and how one has to look at the world to then invent either a lighting unit or emulate a lighting effect one sees happening – and also about two men who have changed the way we light: Nestor Almendros and Mariano Fortuny – both Spaniards.

Some years before I had to go to Russia and there was neat little collapsible trace frame available that I took with me: A great solution for merging the output of several lamps and therefore having only one shadow. If you go travelling to shoot a documentary you don’t get to take too many lights along with you. When I shot the Patriarch of all Russia (during Glasnost) the man saw a bizarre combination of two trace frames with blue over and 4 lights passing through them. Double softness corrected to daylight.

When I got back I thought I could refine this idea somewhat: I invented something I jokingly called the Flaxbox – I’d heard a few years before that Jordan Cronenwerth had invented the Croniecone – something to slip over the front of a 5k or 10k to get soft light out of it, so I figured if he could call his unit after himself – so could I. I took the collapsible trace frame that was roughly 36 inches wide by about 30 inches long. I again asked my partner to construct a black material cover fortified by art card with a 12 inch central square hole in it. This could be mounted on a stand. In the middle of the square the front protruded out by one foot. At back of the frame I suspended a layer of trace, half way down the one-foot square protrusion I mounted another layer of trace. This provided double softening and a form of elementary barn door to specifically aim the soft light wherever I chose. It became a very beautiful portrait unit for various. The light was so soft you didn’t need any diffusion over the lens. You could put a pepper through it, a 1k, 2k or a 1.k2 or 2.5k HMI or any combination of lamps– whatever you put through it became one soft light source with hardly any shadow.I used to carry this around with me and if I got any difficulty from the star, then I showed them what I was going to do by sitting in front of my lamp and then I had to beat them off because they really wanted to be lit like I was! I remember doing a job for the BBC of all people where a super gigantic star (in ego terms too) had a full time lighter. I let him do his job then lit my interviewer and this particularly acute woman saw the image on the monitor and demanded that she swap places to get into the presenters light. I don’t know what happened to the full time guy after this.

I sometimes teach one and two day lighting courses and I pride myself on an apocryphal history that takes into account all of the accidents that fill the annals of our craft that stem from lousy budgets but then provide the most interesting lighting techniques: i.e. low budgets on quota quickies produced film noir lighting – the thinking was, if you do a ‘proper job’ because you haven’t enough lighting units and crew, then create shadows for dramatic effect.

On these courses I tell my apocryphal history starting with the idea that everything on our world can manifest an image. If you leave a stone on another stone long enough then a shadow of that stone will be left. Of course that idea leads to the idea of ‘film speed’ measured in ASA or DIN, which at the very beginning were around half an ASA.

So, on starting I ask one student to sit in front of the class and in front of a camera and another student to turn out the light on the cue of the word ‘light’. Then the classroom is plunged into darkness. I wait for a little while waiting for people’s sensory systems to settle down and move around so that they become aware of sound. I then turn on an angle poise and move around the subject aiming the angle poise at them and ask the remaining students to note what looks good and what doesn’t and then note where the light is.

I then talk about creating separation when you have hardly any tones in black and white, and the simple development of sets outside that can be slowly rotated to face the sun…. I speak about film speeds increasing and therefore having the development of a key light that replicates the Californian sun’s height and the beginning aesthetic awareness that offsetting its angle to the face to avoid direct to full face lighting creates modelling on this egg shaped object we have on out shoulders. I talk about how the Californian sun is low enough to get under the brows and show the eye sockets – but that when the key light is offset you need a fill light to fill in the nose shadow at lower intensity to the key light – etc.

I talk about placing materials in front of lights to mitigate their hardness and about placing materials like stockings in front (or behind) the lens to affect the way the light gets to film. I talk about Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo liking particular cameramen because they kept them beautiful for camera – I talk about the development of film noir – and eventually I come to the seminal moment of modern film lighting experienced by a Spanish cinematographer working in Cuba.

In my lighting classes I demonstrate the effects of all of these different things. I get the students to take on practical challenges to find out things – if this is how you light one seated person – how do you light two? I begin with the very first moment when I get a student standing by the light switch and on cue turning the lights off at the first mention of light and keeping the students in the dark whilst talking about the beauty of light and letting their sensory systems settle down into dark mode. All the way through I tell them that their aesthetic is what they must develop and that this is characterised by a set of likes and dislikes about what is good and fitting and most importantly with a discriminative mind that understands how what they like is produced and how to deduce how what they are seeing on TV and at the movies is produced.

But then the moment comes when after 50 or more years of hard, direct light (albeit greatly moderated by various techniques – and also the advent of 9ASA Tripack Technicolor after the war – suddenly the moment of transition comes. I show them a 100% increase in quality of light over all that has gone before and then tell them the tale of how it came about:

Nestor Almendros was born in 1930 and brought up in Barcelona – a Spanish cinematographer. He immigrated to Cuba in 1948, where he began making amateur films with young Cubans friends, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. He later studied filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale in Italy, and supported himself in New York as a Spanish language teacher, while also conducting his own experiments in cinematography.

Nestor Almendros 1930-1992

Following the Cuban Revolution in 1959, he returned to Cuba, where he secured a job with the state film department, making films for the Cuban Government. One day whilst filming in the interior and because there was no electricity to be had, Almendros had to rig up a mirror, a techniques he had developed, outside the front door of the building, then aim it down the passageway onto another mirror which shone directly to a third mirror which then angled the light at the subject.

This alone should be enough to take the breath away in terms of invention. Yes we’ve all done this sort of thing but to be doing it so far back with film that was possibly only maybe 25 to 50 ASA – that’s stunning. But then something happened, Almedros heard a crash whilst setting up his first two mirrors and found that the third mirror had fallen and smashed but that the beam of light hit the white wall and created an almost holy glow around the subject. Almendros was transfixed at its beauty and proceeded with the work – transformed.

His work was seen in the Paris documentary festivals of the next few years and the audience members, Goddard, Truffaut, Rohmer etc –saw that his work was great and by 1964 he shot Eric Rohmer’s segment of the Nouvelle Vague portmanteau film Paris Vu Par (1964; Paris Seen By). Then in 1967 he shot Rohmer’s feature film La Collectionneuse - he went on to shoot seven more films for Rohmer (among them, Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969; My Night at Maud's), Le Genou de Claire (1970; Claire’s Knee), and Die Marquise von O… (1976), and nine for Francois Truffaut (including Domicile Conjugal (1970; Bed and Board), L'Histoire d'Adèle H (1975; The Story of Adele H), and Le Dernier Métro (1980; The Last Metro). Almendros’ invention of bounced as opposed to direct light was favored by the film-makers of the New Wave because of its realistic feel in opposition to the glamorous techniques of mainstream cinema.

Almendros then made his first foray into American film-making with the Roger Corman-produced The Wild Racers (1968) and Cockfighter (1974), but it was with Days of Heaven (1978), directed by Terrence Malik, that he made his name in America. In the film, shot in rural Alberta, Canada, Almendros abandoned the artificial effects employed by modern cinematographers in favor of natural light. The deliberate simplicity of Almendros’ technique led to conflict with the film’s technical crew, who were unused to such austerity, but the results were exceptional, bringing Almendros an Oscar for Best Photography. Make no mistake – though all inventions are a result of the development of the Zeitgeist and many photographers were heading in this direction – really, the invention, or rather paradigm change of that of mainly using bounced light came from Almendros.

At least that has been my apocryphal tale up until very recently. Here, by the way, I make no apologies for inaccuracies and inconsistencies in my tale save that the basic truth of it is right because it is a question of inspiration when teaching and pulling inspiration, intuition and creativity out of those you teach and if I have to get them into a more visionary space by creative inaccuracy – then so be it. But, just to set the record straight here is a passage from Almendros’s book, ‘A Man with A Camera’:

Working in the countryside and in places we had to use our ingenuity to film inside the huts of Cuban peasants. We had no artificial lighting because it was expensive to take a crew of electricians with us. We thought up the idea of using mirrors, capturing the sunlight from the outside, reflecting it in through the windows and directing it to the ceiling, from where it bounced and lit the whole place. Because the huts were rather dark and the walls dull-colored, we had to cover them with white paper to reflect as much light as possible. I should point out that around that time fashion photographers began using light reflected off white umbrellas. I knew about these methods, though as yet they were not much used in filmmaking. They were techniques I perfected later in France.

Well, the story I’ve been telling is near the truth, but here’s the thing, I think we can all agree that bounced soft light is what the industry is using worldwide – yes it takes more control, flags, baffles etc, but bottom line it’s where we are now. For a start, soft bounced light makes the hideousness of the live digital video signal feel a bit better – whether it’s a ghastly little Z1 all the way up to an Origin, Genesis, F23 or Red – soft light begins the cinematographic process with video – and film just loves it (of course film loves all sorts of light that’s why everyone just goes fluffy when using film).

I think perhaps Julia Margaret Cameron may have known about bounced and reflected light and then later, when movie film became fast enough for interior studio use, the great banks of mercury vapor lamps might also have been emulating the kind of work that Almendros was to later come upon and develop.

So, though we need direct light to create certain elements within the frame we’re can all agree that soft light is useful and contemporarily dominant? Well, just to challenge this history I’d like to introduce a new idea: in 1904 there was a Spaniard (yes, that nation does have an edge on others in the invention of lighting techniques) called Mariano Fortuny.

If you know your history you’ll know the name, but perhaps more in terms of design of fabrics. costumes and wallpapers. Here’s a tip: Next time you go to Venice, go to the Fortuny Museum, which is Fortuny’s old residence of the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei – it’s a museum like no other in the world. But I don’t want to digress.

Mariano Fortuny was born in Granada in the Fonda de los Siete Suelo at the foot of the Alhambra on 11th May 1871. In 1874 his farther died in Rome and in 1875 his mother Cecilia was induced to move the family to Paris. Fortuny copied a Velasquez at the age of 9 and he was sent to learn at the feet of Benjamin Constant. Fortuny frequented the studio of Rodin when he learned about liberating the form from the stone.

Mariano Fortuny 1871-1949

Fortuny was restless in his enquiries about materials and techniques and he was stimulated by the early technical innovations such as that of electrical lighting – this became a dominant idea in his mind as he discovered through a friend of the family, a painter named Boldini, the theatre. What really captured Fortuny’s imagination was a trip behind the scenery, where he saw what the magic of theatre was constructed from which is of course very similar to motion pictures – bar the medium of recording and inscribing the image of course. For Fortuny though, he began to build small models of theatres and sets and he then also became involved in thinking about the possible applications of electricity, physics and optics in the theatre. It was this period and being shown deeper elements of the construction of a theatrical event by a Spanish painter, Egusquiva, that were to stay with Fortuny as he began to invent new techniques of theatrical practice that will be recognized as being at the base of contemporary theatrical technique – as well as being at the base of cinematographic technique!

In 1889 Fortuny’s mother moved the family back to Venice where their house on the Grand Canal became a busy meeting place for artists and writers. Not only did Fortuny paint and etch and practice all of the traditional methods for studying art, he also practiced music, photography and set design. By 1899 he had grown enough to be commissioned by a Countess Albrizzi to design the set and costumes for The Mikado. He then obtained the top floor of a Palazzo where he eventually came to live and it was here that he began his studies of light and experimented with lighting systems finally developing his indirect lighting system:

In the attic of Palazzo Orfei where I worked, the sunshine fell across the floor in a clean slash. As I was arranging the paper for the stage backdrop, it fell exactly into this sunlit area. I stopped in surprise. There, in that low and dim attic, the light that was reflected off the paper was exactly what I had been looking for: not direct light, but reflected light.

In a production at La Scala with the orchestra directed by Toscanini, Fortuny developed sketches for costume and set and with some opposition from La Scala’s stage technicians, he also attempted to implement parts of his new stage lighting system. The technicians may have been suspicious, but the press was ecstatic with the lighting effects and he then registered his first patent for an ‘indirect stage lighting system’. He went to Paris in 1902 and dedicated himself to the construction of stage lighting equipment and to the creation of a device commonly known as the ‘Fortuny Dome.’ It was a concave quarter sphere that was used with his indirect lighting system to enhance the depth effect on the stage set.

With the help of my capable technician, I built my dome of out of plaster 5 meters in diameter. We projected reflected light upon it and added other colored lights, creating fusion and transition effects and a variety of hues that invariably impressed all visitors.

On 6th April 1904 he registered an invention entitled ‘Systeme de constituton d’une paroi concave au moyen d’une capacite gonflable’. Fortuny had created a dome for the Countess and added the following refinement: The walls of the dome were made of two parallel layers of fabric supported in a metal frame. A fan blew air between the two layers, creating pressure and making the surface toward the stage completely smooth. In addition to his complex stage lighting system, Fortuny had the chance to install other new equipment in the theatre. For the first time, he introduced a bridge and then a second walkway above the stage, used by stage technicians to mount the lights. Not only this but he created a system to raise and lower the stage and for the first time ever in the history of theatre, he installed a director’s booth at the back of the auditorium for the lighting operator, who could better direct the lighting effects to the stage.

I’ve used the term ‘theatre’ in a lot of the above description of Fortuny’s activities, but it shouldn’t take much imagination to see what effect Fortuny has had on contemporary lighting and also cinematic studio design. But – not only this. Fortuny created designs for fabric, patented carbon-pigment photographic paper, advised Klimt on the use of gold in his painting, created set design and lighting effects, photographed, played music, researched the history of fabric and created pleated silks inspired by Egyptian Design that later influenced Issey Miyake’s work in the 1970’s and onwards – and, invented many domestic lighting units that are now present in their modern day forms in every household. His wood and metal table lamp of 1929 is the ancestor to Pixar’s dancing lamp.

By the way - every lamp in this article outside of my two are designed by Fortuny - go back and have a look at the wit, intelligence and inventiveness of the man.

There’s a lot more than this but the point of bringing Fortuny into an article about cinematographic lighting technique is the issue of noticing how light behaves and acting on that recognition. Many distinguished cinematographers and gaffers create lights to do specific jobs – Jordan Cronenweth’s famed Croniecone used on films like Blade Runner are a case in point – but, can you imagine a moment perhaps in the 17th Century, or the 6th Century – or maybe way back in our collective pasts where some bright person noticed and became transfixed by the way light bounces, reflects, glows, or passes through a medium like water or smoke and has an epiphany that is then translated into a practical act: for those of us that work with light, that most insubstantial but most powerful of materials I think it helps to know that we exist within a tradition that goes far beyond the cinema that we know and love.

Making the Unreal Real

I haven’t written for a while and that’s because I’ve been very busy with the launch of In Other People’s Skins at Winchester cathedral in the UK. The history of its production can be seen in my previous blogs and there’s even a ‘Making of’ video which you can watch by clicking the link to the right. I hope at a later date to add some video from the open evening at the cathedral, which shows the truly amazing response this piece of work has received. Here though I want to focus on something that was previously a theory and has now become an actuality: High Definition visual elements can be mistaken for ‘real’ things.

My theoretical proposition was that at dusk there is a shifting between two optical elements within our eyes and minds, which can lead to mistaking what is actually happening before us. As the light lowers our eyes have to switch between the cones and rods, the former well adapted from a mammalian past for seeing colour and the latter inherited from our far distant insect past where movement and visual acuity in the dark was most important. During the switch over, the two technologies are switching back and forth in our minds as the ‘common sense’ tries to make some systematic choice about the correct light level to work with and therefore the correct technology.

What happens at dusk is that we see certain things at a far brighter colour intensity than they actually are: The traffic light is too green or amber, the brake lights on the car in front too intense.

Taking this example as an analogy for what happens in high definition imaging, according to my theory, there should be a place where we actually mistake the image for the real. This was confirmed during the open evening at Winchester in two ways: One bright person saw the image of the plates moving on the table and actually thought that the real white plates I’d placed on the table to catch the virtual images, were moving.

Another very visual person that I know saw one of the white plates on the table whilst only the image of the red table cloth was being projected on to it and for a moment wondered where the red plate had come from - before what was previously known by her, that the plate was white and had red projected on to it, came back into her mind to reconfirm that this was an optical illusion and that the plate was in fact white. In both cases the borderline of the real and imaginary was crossed. True immersivity had been achieved.

I’m not interested in parlour tricks at all. It is of no interest to me to ‘trick a viewer. What I am interested in is exploring this borderline place to find out how we may be affected by the technology that we inhabit. It is an ontological enquiry and I realise several things about the work that I have made: essentially it is a work about belief and this is very appropriate given that the work is exhibiting in a space dedicated to a belief – not a place dedicated to knowledge of something, but about faith in belief as a route to knowing. But that’s by the by. In Other People’s Skins is concerned both in terms of form and in terms of content with the act of belief, and the immersiovity and interactivity it engenders should lead the viewer to think about belief and therefore commitment.

This is a philosophical enquiry that should in the end generate a tolerant approach to ideas. We will see.

Also the work as I have just mentioned is also about interactivity – about doing and being. Some people have mentioned that there is no interactive element in the technology. This is after all a projection and it amuses me to think that this work could have been made at the end of the 19th century at the beginning of cinematography with a projector, a mirror and a table and chairs. But actually this is an interactive work. People simply cannot stop moving the plates around the table. It invokes an obsessive compulsive response to reposition the real plates where the virtual plates are projected. Of course the image changes all the time and therefore the plates must continuously be moved to be in the ‘right’ place.

I think this element is similar to the immersive question that virtual reality designers were up against in the 1980’s. It was believed that if you put some goggles on and then project an image of a virtual world you could experience that world. But of course to convince a person of their presence within a virtual space it had to look ‘real’ and of course reality takes no prisoners, it is as high resolution and definition as it gets, so no graphic representation can fulfil the requirements of belief.

Interestingly, immersivity can be obtained without this sort of literal approach. Get 4 people playing monopoly and you achieve immersivity – not the literal conviction that the 4 people are warring capitalists, but a joyful commitment to the game rule sufficient to keep the people occupied in the same way that they would be if committed to a ‘real world’ act. Equally, interactivity can be obtained without this literal element where people have to press Pavlovian ‘buttons’ to achieve a response from the person (i.e. walk into a sound or infra red beam to trigger some kind of event).

So, by allowing people to sit and touch this virtual work they become engaged with the interactive and immersive sides of their own nature and together with the paraphernalia of the artwork itself, table chairs, plates candles, projector, computer, tent – all of it – they themselves are the artwork. This is my first discovery within the high definition medium and as my enquiry proceeds, I hope to understand and articulate what the issues are and then create and make work that inhabits this particular borderland of our experience.