Soft Cinema: Summary

Soft Cinema is a potentially unlimeted set of short movies constructed with the help of the custom software. Some of the movies are in the tradition of “film essays,” some are fictional narratives, some are non-narrative ambient music videos. While the sound track of each movie is fixed by the author, the visual track is constructed by software. This includes the layout of a screen, the selection of media elements and their temporal order. In other words, software decides what appears on the screen, where, and in what sequence. The decisions made by software are partly based on a system of rules defined by the author and partly random. In short, Soft Cinema can be thought of as an automatic VJs - or more precisely, a FJ (Film Jockey).

Soft Cinema software selects video clips and animations from a database. Each video clip in the database follows Dogma 95 rules: it is shot using hand-held camera, it contains no edits, etc. Most of the clips have been recorded by the author in Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, San Paolo and other locations between 1999 and 2002; the rest of the clips are simulated (i.e. a still image was animated to look like a video shot on location).

The length of each movie corresponds to the typical length of a music track (3 - 7 minutes).