Lev Manovich

Soft Cinema: abstract

Soft Cinema is a set of short videos: some are in the tradition of “film essays,” some are fictional fragments, some are more ambient audi-visual streams. Each video has a semi-random image track. A computer program assembles this track in real-time from a library of DV clips located on a PC hard drive. The program uses a system of rules that determine which clip should be selected after the one currently playing.

Soft Cinema: Concepts

Soft Cinema is based on three ideas.

The first is algorithmic editing of media materials. Each video clips used in Soft Cinema is assigned keywords which describe both the "content" of a clip (geographical location, presence of people in the scene, etc.) and its "formal" properties (dominant color, dominant line orientation, contrast, camera movement, etc.). Some of the keywords are generated automatically using image processing software while others are input by hand. The program (written in LINGO) assembles the video track by selecting clips one after another using a system rules (i.e. an algorithm). Diffirent systems of rules are possible: for instance, selecting a clip which is closest in color or type of motion to the previous one; selecting a clip which matches the previous one party in content and party in color, repalcing only every other clip to create a kind of parallel montage sequence, and on on.

The second idea is what I call macro-cinema. While filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis have already used a multi-screen format for fiction films, thinking about the visual conventions of Graphical User Interface as used in computer culture gives us a diffirent way to do macro-cinema. If a computer user employs windows of diffirent proportions and sizes, why not adopt the similar aesthetics for cinema? In Soft Cinema, the generation of each video begins with the computer program semi-ranomly breaking the screen into a number of square regions of diffirent dimensions. During the playback diffirent clips are assigned to diffirent regions. In this way, software determines both temporal and spatial organisation of a work, i.e. both sequnecing of clips and their composition.

The third idea is to create a true multi-media cinema. In Soft Cinema video is used as just one type of representation among others: 2D animation, motion graphics (i.e. animated text), stills, 3D scenes (as in computer games), diagrams, etc. In addition, Soft Cinema supplements a "normal" video image with other types of lens-based imagiory commonly used today by industry, science, medecine and military: the low res web cam image, an infrared image, edge-detected image as employed in computer vision, etc. While some music videos and artist videos already mix some of these diffirent types of imagery in one work, Soft Cinema assigns each type of imagery to a separate window in order to dramatize the new status of “normal” video, photographic and film image today – no longer the dominant but just one source of visual information about reality among many others. The additional inspiration for using diffirent representation of the same scene next to each other comes from the display setups used in medecine, aviation and other contemporary workplaces. Finally, rather than simply using these diffirent types of representation for a purely visual effect, Soft Cinema investigates the possibilities of using them together for fictional narration.(For a more detailed description, go to www.manovich.net)