Nautilus

Are Digital Cameras Changing the Nature of Movies?

A landmark use of deep focus in film: The young Charles Foster Kane—in the background, but still in focus—is sent away by his poor parents in Colorado to live with a wealthy banker in New York.Mercury Productions / RKO Radio Pictures

This is part one of a three-part series about the movie industry’s switch to digital cameras and what is lost, and gained, in the process. Part two runs tomorrow; part three runs on Friday.

inema is a blend of art and technology, working together to capture light, one frame at a time, to create the illusion of motion. Sometimes the captured, the spectacular wide-screen landscapes shot by Freddie Young in , or the super-slo-mo “bullet time” cinematography of . Sometimes it’s the apex of simplicity, a technique so transparent it appears almost artless, as in the black-and-white compositions of Robert Bresson or the free-form streetscapes of Richard Linklater’s .

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus2 min read
Color-Coding Crops for Climate Change
Green is the color of growth in the plant world. From an aerial view, most farms blanket the land in quilts of varying shades of green. But what if the stems and leaves of your average corn, barley, and rice plants were hairy and blue instead? One te
Nautilus7 min read
Insects and Other Animals May Have Consciousness
In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Give
Nautilus7 min read
A Radical Rescue for Caribbean Reefs
It’s an all-too-familiar headline: Coral reefs are in crisis. Indeed, in the past 50 years, roughly half of Earth’s coral reefs have died. Coral ecosystems are among the most biodiverse and valuable places on Earth, supporting upward of 860,000 speci

Related Books & Audiobooks