How Cinema Is Digital

Abstract

Filmmaking has traditionally been a very structured, expensive, and hierarchical process. Digital technologies open up new mechanisms and processes, which can offer alternatives to the stable systems of production, distribution, and exhibition. There has been a paradigm shift as digital and computer technologies are changing the parameters for how movies are made, distributed, and seen. Acting as a survey of the current landscape, this chapter examines the process of moviemaking and what methods, producers, cooperations, and communities are enabled by the influx of digital technologies. It explores how digital technologies are altering the nature of moviemaking, some of the affordances provided, and the ways in which they are already being exploited by creative and often amateur moviemakers.