◡◶▿ ROTT10 | Resolution

🖨️ Building your movie brick by brick. And bulldozing it down again with love. Plus: the Other MA and a Fellowship at Emerald City | Rotting the Image Week 10

Dec 04, 2023

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Okay, right. Welcome back to filmmaking class. Make yourselves comfortable, and let’s recap last week’s lesson briefly. We learned how:

An analogue film camera requires close attention just to ensure an exposed image.
So the filmmaker must take care not to neglect the ‘settings’ of the scene in front of the camera.
But with a digital camera, the reverse is true: it's so easy to start, the filmmaker might race ahead with the ‘factory settings’ - producing an image that is dull and lifeless.
We also took a look at Kodak’s boxy new Super 8 camera.

Yep, yep, yep. Today, we will look at image resolution. We’ll cover:

📺 What image resolution actually is - technically and spiritually.

🖨️ The machines and the strangers who will decide your resolution for you.

🗺️ The movie’s image resolution as the blueprint of its own destruction.

🧱 The power of the pixel.

Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.

Unfound Peoples Videotechnic thrives as it grows. But it only grows when you good people share these lessons or our archive with the artists and filmmakers in your milieu. Please do so if you can. Please help the school to thrive and grow.

Resolutions

You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.

‘Image resolution’ concerns the loosening or release of an image and its reconstitution elsewhere. In particular, the word refers to a technical standard. A shared way of measuring an image’s detail and density. The image’s detail and density at its points of release and reconstitution.

600 ppi, 720p, Full HD. That sort of thing.

To make a movie, the live-action filmmaker must loosen a series of images from their source and prepare them for transfer.

For this, she uses the techniques of photography. The source from which she loosens each image tends to be a combination of people, place, atmosphere, and things. Released from this source, an image finds its way:

through the optics of the camera,
across the sensor or film material,
to be processed and filtered on its way
to a chain of
1. storage,
2. distribution, and
3. exhibition formats, and
is finally released into the eye.
- And the brain.
  - And all the other parts of the audience that a movie gets into.

The photographed scene is packed with an infinity of visual matter. With the ideal apparatus, there is no end to the detail that might be loosened and later reconstituted. But this perfect apparatus does not exist. So, the filmmaker, her distributors, exhibitors, and audiences, must cooperate in arranging the most appropriate apparatus for the job. And this band of people must decide which resolution(s) the movie will assume throughout its trip.

They must decide:

how much detail,
what type of detail,
what is the arrangement of the detail, and
how the detail is to be handled

for each step of the way.

The perfect apparatus doesn’t exist. And each station along the image’s journey has its own limits and flaws. So, it stands to reason that only the most high-cost, high-priority releases might be reconstituted with close fidelity to the original. A tiny, tiny fraction of all the incidences of movie-watching.

So, the filmmaker prioritises values other than “high fidelity” when considering the resolution of her movie.

The compromised resolution

To make a movie, the live-action filmmaker must loosen her images from their source. For this, she uses the techniques of photography. A combination of light, electronics, and chemicals. She loosens images from people, places, atmosphere, and things, and she prepares them for transfer.

Eventually, the filmmaker’s images will reconstitute themselves on the screens and retinas of the audience. Okay. But along their way, these images are reconstituted, re-loosened, and re-reconstituted multiple times. Reconstituted, re-loosened, and re-reconstituted through various barely-compatible mechanisms. Cameras, edit suites, formats of distribution and exhibition.

The quantity and quality of detail is changed along the way. It “resolves” again and again.

As Rosa Menkman1 points out: resolutions “involve compromises between different matters.” In the case of image resolution, says Menkman, the filmmaker must choose between what is “obscured, obfuscated, deleted, or not rendered.”

In filmmaking, the standard convention is to gloss over these compromises. To distract from this tension and gloss over the patinas that emerge. Even though these compromises are the structural underpins of a movie’s image. What a silly convention: to obfuscate the obfuscations. Where will it end?

The filmmaker might instead prepare for her movie to continue on in a ruined state.

Ruined buildings break down into crumbs, but the crumbs of a ruined movie gel and clump together. What will the filmmaker hide between her blocks? What will she use as a cement?

A pixel

Some consider it “cute” that everyday audience members concern themselves with the matter of the pixel. After all, a pixel is the smallest unit of a digital image and near-meaningless by itself. “How many pixels have you got yourself there?” one cinephile might say to another. “Oh, a real pocketful of pixels!” replies the other.

However, the filmmaker decides for herself the importance of each individual pixel. And the nature of the stacked array of pixels; its resolution. She is wary to avoid attending so closely to a single pixel that she neglects the overall array. And she is wary not to become so caught up in the array that she neglects the image as a living, dying whole.

Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.

An other art school; Factory fellowship

It’s mostly UK-based stuff from here on down this week; you may be dismissed if you live elsewhere. Work hard, play hard, my foreign friends!

Has anybody been to the new Factory arts centre in Manchester (UK) yet? I didn’t realise it had opened! I’m a little out of touch with the town where I lived and worked for ten years. Perhaps I didn’t realise because the Factory has been renamed Aviva Studios as part of some kind of sponsorship deal.

It never seemed like a nice idea to me. To spend hundreds of millions on a new arts cathedral or Emerald City in Manchester. The city just got one a few years ago.

Designed by the Koolhaas people, it’s an attempt to raise Manchester’s corporate and tourism profiles. But the city is known for its chancey outsiders, indiepreneurs, and agit rebels. The money might have been better spent creating smaller, better-distributed studios and venues for them. Instead of another Emerald City.

But it’s there. And maybe it’s a good thing! (Let me know in the comments.) And it’s offering its first artists’ fellowship, if you’re based in the north of England and might benefit from that sort of thing. The deadline to apply is 15th December.