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Painting and Film Photography for Illustration Are Both Dead. What's Next?
1/4/2006
Except for purists and as a niche art form, film photography is gone. (My 17-year-old daughter is taking a black and white photography class and she's angry with me for writing these words, but they're true.) Now, so is hand illustration. What's next?
Acting and actors are next. The use of avatars in online simulations, their availability as acting-out images for websites, and now the wonderful work done with and by the actor Andy Serkis who was Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and now is Kong in the new King Kong movie, surely is pointing the way to the demise of 'real' actors. We're probably not far from the time when teams of technicians and artists replace actors who are actually seen on the screen. After all, the nation's film critic Roger Ebert says that the new King Kong:
[I]s a magnificent entertainment. It is like the flowering of all the possibilities in the original classic film. Computers are used not merely to create special effects, but also to create style and beauty, to find a look for the film that fits its story. And the characters are not cardboard her'es or villains seen in stark outline, but quirky individuals with personalities.
That probably d'esn't mean that no one will make 'films' with real people, after all there are lots of 'real' people in King Kong. But in the near future, movies with actual people in them may not be where the money is. And you know what's important in Western Culture: money. So, yes, film photography is becoming a niche art; and movies with real people in them may become that, too, but not disappear. After all, opera is still around.
Some people feel that art or entertainment loses something when it uses new technologies. Some people always feel that way everything changes. Part of that, I think, is an inability (by some, I surely am able to see it) to see that even when a team of people create an image together, the human touch is still there. To them I say, as Mike Everhart is quoted as saying, above, "sometimes, extinction is good."
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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