Filming Techniques as a Means of Creating a New Cinematic Reality

Abstract

The article treats filming methods not as much as purely applied technologies but as the sources of filmmakers’ creative endeavors, the basis of inventing new cinematic images for meeting diverse artistic challenges, as well as the possibility of designing a new cinematic reality, rendering the director’s concepts including grotesque fancies and speculative pictures. They also make it possible to create new artistic and semantic contexts, enrich cinema’s visual language, and push the limits of production resources.
Although the influence of technology on film art rarely becomes the subject of academic research, technological progress broadens the inventory of shooting techniques and methods, thus making a huge impact on the evolution of filmmaking. The author makes an attempt to examine some shooting techniques as the source of artistic choices, as a powerful instrument of shaping the basics of filmmaking as both art and spectacle, rather than a mere engineering aid.
Such shooting techniques as high-speed, time-lapse, reverse-motion and frame-by-frame photography, the ability to assemble several successive images into one and combine photography with the projection of previously shot frames made it possible to create and present a completely new cinematic reality. These techniques have largely shaped the language of cinema, its artistic and semantic codes. Creative use of shooting methods and their transformation into artistic and cinematographic devices have led to the emergence of ingenious dramatic patterns, a wider range of narrative themes, the creation of new characters, including non-existent ones, made it possible to visualize the stream of consciousness and diverse speculative pictures. The ways of shooting expanded and enriched the genre diversity of cinema. Moreover, shooting techniques based on the very nature of film shooting and video recording became the main means of meeting a variety of visual challenges, thereby providing film-makers with enormous opportunities to solve the most complex creative, organizational and financial issues which makes cinema the most popular and spectacular medium.