Misson to Earth

1. Using "Mission to Earth" as an example, note what is new or different about digital cinema compared to traditional filmmaking? Consider the story and appearance of the film.

Digital filmmaking is highly different from traditional one in both visual and narrative aspect. For visual aspect, traditonal film making rely hughly on cameras to record images, like hand held cameras, they have technological restriction that they can only make video on-the-spot. It turns out that the visual style of those videos are quite realistic and down to earth. On the other hand, film makers can capture or even create images through digital filmmaking, such as twisting the image, bluring it or even showing the image in a multi-frame window. Directors can freely compose a scene out of his own imagination, no matter they may run counter to natural discipline. In the movie Mission to Earth, the number of windows appear in a layout is oftern seen, suggesting different aspect of the character: her seeing, thoughts, memories and the like.

As for narrative aspect, traditional filming usually have a main theme, a story line or you may say - plot. In which we can easily get hold of the development of the story even in patomime, the story is clear. But in digital filmmaking, the plot is ambiguous and some images are pletiuful yet unclear to the whole story development. They seem like being linked together arbitarily. So in the better part of the movie, voice over is needed to help spectators to grab th idea of the movie.

2. What other art forms (e.g. film, digital art, painting, websites etc) does this film remind you of? Explain the similarities.

Paintings

Some scene reminds me of paintings of  Piet Mondrian, who plays with geometric patterns in his finger tips.

We may see that Lev Manovich also likes to deasign the layout in geometric form.

This image  was cut in the movie which is very painting-liked, it reminds me of some painting in Impressionism.


 Music
It makes me think of a type of music : post rock. Both the movie and post rock music are not mainstream genre type. I think it is a must to appreciate them with full attention from beginning to the end, othervise the poetic nexus will be lost.

In fact you may find his music in Mission to Earth:)