Filmmaking in the Digital Age

If you’re interested in filmmaking as a profession, then you’re certainly living in the right period. Never before in the history of cinema have the aesthetic possibilities been so diverse. Digitization has also revolutionized the process of film production. Historical subjects, science fiction, elaborate action, fantasy-adventure, 3D in both live action and animation: What seemed practically impossible in European cinema 20 years ago is today not only aesthetically and technically feasible but also financially viable.

Thanks to digital technology, film has become software, initiating a radical rethinking of an effective medium that has  (paradigm shift) previously relied on linear space and time narrative – with far-reaching consequences. The current transition is fundamentally changing our traditional definition and concept of film.

What is digital cinema? By no means a dying medium, but rather a very vital art form that is currently in the process of redefining itself. 
What has previously been completely separate both in aesthetic practice and production processes  – the photorealistic film and the animation film – have now merged and in the process is redefining the character and identity of cinema. Photorealistic scenes can also now be generated on the computer and all this data, irrespective of how it came to be produced, can almost be limitlessly modified, painted and morphed according to the desired effect. Cinema is no longer the medium that conveys reality and solidifies it. To quote the great American media scholar Lev Manovich, digital cinema represents an “elastic reality”. The ability to manipulate single digital images or scene by scene, film potentially becomes a sequence of “paintings, paintings in time” (Lev Manovich).
 
Digital cinema is making traditional processes and methods obsolete at breathtaking speed. This also has enormous implications on the single film professions. Crafts that have traditionally worked independently are now merging together at their edges. The linearity of classic film production is also being replaced by parallel-running and interlinked processes.

At the ifs you can explore what it means to work aesthetically and innovatively as a filmmaker with the knowledge of more than a 100-year tradition combined with the possibilities of digital cinema – and in the process discover the new media for yourself. 

With both your and our enthusiasm for the media diversity and its aesthetic transformation, our goal is to support you in finding your place in the media landscape of the future.