My first assignment: future screening
FUTURE SCREENING
how we will see and experience cinema at the time that we call the future
By Ferdinando Dell’Omo,
assignment #1, FUTURE CINEMA II, January 2012
Having to imagine how I personally see the future of movie screening, or how I’d like to imagine it, I want firstly to start with a statement about cinema: I believe that the future will break definitely the division in between fiction and documentary, or if one will, the division between cinema and reality. With this that might sound as a hackneyed concept, I want instead to say that I believe that in the future the audience will want to experience everything on a “personal” level; in this sense every fictional story will have somehow to resonate with one’s own experience on a narrative (which it has always happened), but also on visual level. Every movie will be able to contain elements of the real life of the viewer; it will be the sublimation of the idea of “identification with the protagonist”. So, just to give an example, I believe that the hero of Mission Impossible #25 will not only be able to represent a projection of the viewers’s desires because of the way in which that character is written, directed and acted, but also because he/it will be customizable by the single viewer with elements of his/her own real life. So, let’s say I will be able to change Tom Cruise’s cloths based on my own taste, or the setting of the story, the locations or even to change his face with mine.
Some video games already work this way, but in a sense, this “future cinema” will go further, and it will generate the merging of fictional stories into real/personal ones. In a way, every movie will be a docudrama with the viewer as protagonist.
I consider this scenario to be realist for three main reasons; firstly because I think that this way of experiencing films it is a natural evolution of what a part of cinema as always wanted to achieve: to make the audience embodying the hero’s journey and struggles. Second because the idea of customize and personalize every commercial “experience” is in tune with the new frontiers of marketing strategies. Finally because it will satisfy our hedonistic desire/illusion (to be able) to be the protagonist of the more and more controlled lives in which we will live.
In order to enjoy this kind of new cinema experience I feel that 3D images will be mandatory,
I believe that perhaps the movie will not just been screened, but instead “re-created” as an hologram in everybody’s living room.
Furthermore, being able to access the internet, the “movie” will include in its own fruition documentary elements abstracted from the net, doing what every documentary does: researching and capturing reality.
I’m thinking of the amount information contained in social medias like Facebook, and about how useful they will become as tool and source to “re-created” someone’s life.
In this sense, the “movie” will be able to integrate those information, images, personal stories in the plot of the film and simultaneously to screen them in its visual representation.
I’ve recently seen the presentation of a software called Photosynth that in way marks the future for documentaries and photography. This a software is application (from Microsoft) that collects digital photographs from the web and analyzes them to generate a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object. Pattern recognition components compare portions of images to create points, which are then compared to convert the image into a 3D model. In this sense if I have live Pisa, Italy and I want Mission Impossible #25 to be set in that town, the movie will be able to find in the Internet pictures, videos and other visual and non visual information in order to customize my fruition of the movie in my living room.
So just sitting on my sofa, I’ll see a Tom Cruise with my own face – or if/when I prefer I’ll see everything from his/my point-of-view – fighting some Russians spies (perhaps with the faces of people that I dislike) in my living room, escaping to Pisa, fins shelter in my parents’s house in the Tuscan countryside, and making love with the I met last night in a party and with whom I just became friend on Facebook.
Oh, by the way, if I’ll pay extra money for the de-luxe package of the film, I’ll also experience the pleasure and satisfaction of winning an Oscar for my performance.
p.s.
I apology for my English mistakes…
One Ping