SOFT CINEMA: DEMO

QuickTime 320x240
QuickTime 240x180
Windows Media 320x240
Windows Media 240x180
Real Player 320x240
Real Player 240x180

SOFT CINEMA: IMAGES

hi-res stills for print
[3200 x 2300 ]


jpeg 2.3 Mg
tiff 5.8 Mg

jpeg 1.5 Mg
tiff 3.9 Mg

screen grabs
[800 x 580]
jpegs 30-40 Kb

screen layout
examples

SOFT CINEMA: CONCEPTS

Summary

Soft Cinema is a (potentially unlimited) collection of short movies in different styles. Some are in the tradition of a film essay, some are fictional narratives, some are ambient music videos. The narratives presented via voice over come from a collection of stories written by the author between 1998 and 2002 and entitled Global User Interface [GUI]. The visuals are drawn from a large database of video clips and animations.

While the sound track of each movie is fixed by the author, the visual track is constructed by software. It 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 a semi-automatic VJs - or more precisely, a FJ (Film Jockey).

Each video clip in database follows Dogma 95 rules: it is shot using handheld 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).



[ Soft Cinema Concepts: Full Version ]

Soft Cinema: Concepts: Compressed Version


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.

Project History

Soft Cinema incorporates the earlier project macro-cinema (1997-2000) which itself was developed as reaction to the earlier project little movies (1994-1997).

Additional Texts

The original Soft Cinema proposal for ZKM (2000):
www.manovich.net/ cinema_future/manovich_proposal_1.htm

The text from The Language of New Media on macro-cinema (1999):
www.manovich.net/macrocinema.doc

Soft Cinema is an example of a "database narrative" proposed in my article Database as a Symbolic Form (1998)

SOFT CINEMA: ARCHITECTURE

Referencing brandscaping (the three-dimensional design of brand settings), early algorithmic computer art, and the logic of modernist art movements (where paintings, graphic design, archiecture, and industrial design were typically driven by a single aesthetic system), we use the same algorithm to generate the screen layouts, the layout of Soft Cinema book, and the 3D layouts of Soft Cinema Installation. The proportions between different surfaces in the installation are the same as the proportions of the difirent windows in Soft Cinema Movies. (If Modular was based on the dimensions of a human body, our system of proportions takes as its origin the dimensions of DV NTSC image: 720 x 480 pixels.) In addition, the contrast between diffirent types of images (video, 2D animation, etc.) in Soft Cinema movies is translated into the contrast between diffirent materials in the installation.

(Concept by Jason Danziger - think/build group)

INSTALLATION DESIGN

Lev Manovich: Initial Concepts
July 2002
1 installation description
2 theory part A
3 theory part B
4 overall view
5 possible spatial layouts
6 private viewing ares: transparency effect
7 furniture examples


Jason Danziger: Design Proposals
September 2002
plan PDF
elevation PDF

SOFT CINEMA: NARRATIVES

The texts used for voice over in Soft Cinema movies come from a collection of stories written by the author between 1998 and 2002 and entitled Global User Interface [GUI]. Each story takes place in a diffirent location: Texas, Hamburg, Kiev, Mongolia, etc. (In writing the short stories, I followed the principle that they can only take place in the locations I never visited.)

Each story has been divided into a number of sequential parts, each part becoming a short movie. At the beginning of each part software generates a new screen layout, which can consist from two to six different windows. Software also selects which video clips and animations will play in these windows and in what order. This process is repeated for each of the parts. Following the same logic, diffirent voices are used for the diffirent parts of a story.

The small window in the bottom left corner identifies the part of a story currently playing (for instance, texas_01.txt, texas_02.txt, etc.) A narrow horizontal window presents scrolling sentences selected from the same story part.

The length of each movie corresponds to the typical length of a music track (3 - 6 minutes).

While the stories refer to the processes of globalisation and their effects of subjectivity, the visual track makes similar references in diffirent ways. Since most clips show the typical urban activities, Soft Cinema at first can be thought of as belonging to the genre of "city films" defined by such classics such as "A Man with a Movie Camera" and a "Symphony of a City." However, in contrast to these earlier films which included the expressive shots of various form of industrial labor, Soft Cinema repeatedly returns to the same bland image of information labor: a person in front of a computer. In addition, since we often see the clips shot on diffirent continents side by side, Soft Cinema more properly can be thought as a “global city film.”

Put differently, the subject of Soft Cinema is a new “global style” or a “global layer” of globalization: the hotel lobbies, the airport waiting lounges, shopping, the info-workers staring at computer terminals, the reflecting and transparent surfaces of office buildings, people waiting for the next train on a new shiny station, etc.

RELATED PROJECTS

www.thickspace.net
[ AVRA - free software for random playback of video]

www.korsakow.com
[Korsakov tool - free software for the construction of interactive movies]

www.muvee.com
[commercial software]

www.artscilab.org/expandedcinema.html
[text of Expanded Cinema, 1970]

www.neither-field.com/ok
["an autonomous video texture generator
constant remixes from a d.base of graphic abstraction"]