Friday, April 22, 2011

The Creativity and Influence in a Digital Era

With several advances, the digital age has brought us many new innovative and unique ways of completing work, developing art, and inner connecting, or social networking, with other people around the world. It has benefitted us in so many ways. Such things as being able to access videos, documentaries, audio files, pictures and portraits, and other things incredibly fast. Years ago, this would have never been possible. Yet even with all these technological advances, in my mind, I feel like such advances and changes have also brought somewhat of a demise to creativity and social interaction. It becomes more common now to email, text, and message other individuals in order to come in contact with them. Due to this unfortunate, and although easy, means of communication, we have become much less reliant of personal face to face confrontations, something that used to have quite a bit a stature only years ago. I feel that not enough can be worded with in digital messages to completely express what could be better worded in a personal confrontation. This can even be lengthened to individual art forms. In filmmaking,  there have been multiple advances in technology. The digital era has provided young filmmakers with the opportunity to shoot faster, easier, and cheeper footage with completely digital cameras. Film is no longer required, occasionally less lights, less time is consumed, and fewer people are needed. However I feel this has greatly impacted the industry in a negative way. Any given person can look at an image on a large screen and determine whether or not it had been computer generated or was model work (I appreciate model work, and everything real-in-camera better than anything computerized). Many people can also look at a film and tell over all whether it was shot digitally, or on a film format. With film, filmmakers would spend more time during each setup, making sure everything was perfect, no matter how long it would take, due to limited film stock. With this in mind, after the film was processed, the images that would come back were so beautiful and crisp. But with the use of digital, cameras can be kept rolling. There is no limited film stock, it is limitless. The DP can just dump all of the data and footage onto a hard-drive and keep uploading directly onto a computer. Quite a few people may argue that this is a positive. I disagree in the belief that it is affecting the quality of the overall product, resulting in sloppy work that continually looks more artificial, and less like reality. Film has a unmatchable beauty and quality to it. With all of its imperfections and grain, it offers us such a unique way to watch physically moving images through a projector. Digital does not provide me with that at least.

Overall, as always, digital will have its pros and cons. It provides us with an easier way of doing things. easier methods of mass communication (especially that of the news, and entertainment industry). It assists in making eduction easier to reach. In many ways, it also helps us become more "green", using less valuable recourses.  But you just have to ask one big question: Are you satisfied with the over all quality with the result of what is being produced?

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