1. 1
Questions to be answered include the advantages to
animatic storyboards and DV video cameras also the
advances to CGI and the benefits and downfalls.
Having used Animatic
storyboards, I know that they are
useful to the director to create as
it gives an initial feel to how the
film or even scenes will play out
as animatic storyboards are
moving image storyboards
which reveal scenes as they will
in the film, drawing characters
and their movements (not
usually completely fluid
animation however) and this is
often now done on a computer
using a drawing tablet and
Photoshop in order to create the
film and this then allows the
creator to export and see how
long the scenes are but also
showing which angles to use and
the length of the soundtrack that
needs to be made. A good
example is seen here with
Despicable Me 2 (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?
v=uHrguUH1qz4) and it depicts
the uses of lighting and
character & camera movements.
THEDIGITALAGE
Examples of the
best films that have
blown their
audience away with
the advances in
CGI. Examples
include The Matrix
(top), Avatar
(bottom left) and
Inception (bottom
right).
ANDREFRANCESCOSANTOSALLAN
In my view therefore,
they are extremely useful
for numerous reasons and
show a preliminary film
before complete
production begins and
outlines any potential
problems at the early
stages possible and not
only animated films such
as Despicable Me use them, I
found examples for Iron
Man and for scenes that
never made it to the final
cut of the Lord of the Rings
trilogy as pictured to the
left hand side.
Overall, they have
many advantages over
your traditional
storyboard and show how
a film will play out and are
particularly useful with
animation films and thus
Pixar and Disney use them
frequently.

2. 2
ANDREFRANCESCOSANTOSALLANTHEDIGITALAGE
CGI
Advantages and
Disadvantages.
CGI has come a long way and they
have clearly made a significant impact
upon mainstream movies and the box
office and allows people as the audience
to enjoy historic events such as in
Gladiator. With modern day
productions, the use of visual effects
means that less physical work is put into
it and even so the current state of CGI
allows the audience to really feel
immersed into a film because of the
believable CGI (e.g. Life of Pi).
However various cons have been
pointed out and they include the fact
that they are simply becoming overused
in big budget hollywood movies and
now have begun to lose their special
effect on us audience, pardon the pun.
An example of this would be The Hobbit
or Spider-man.
Some may go to the extent of
arguing that it is just laziness for a film-
maker to use CGI and begins to give
the film a feel of a cartoon as the best
films are drive completely by the story
(physically), for example Shawshank
Redemption which used no special effects
and remains number 1 on IMDb’s ‘Top
250’.
DV Cameras?
What are their
Advantage?
DV came around in 1995 and offered
the first format at storing digital video
and since then there has been vast
improvement but most notably their
advantages made a mockery over
traditional film.
The first thing to clearly note is
the improvement in the video quality,
high definition digital video cameras
came around and are now fast
becoming the preferred choice over
film and this is because of the high
speed film quality offered and that
when dealing with negatives it is often
found to be a pain because of the
poor colours that come as the
outcome.
Another advantage is that film of
course has many limitations when in
comparison with digital video such as
the potential bad development leading
to bad quality video and also the much
easier ability to import, upload and edit
footage with digital media.
A fairly obvious but very useful one
is the storage space, for example when
storing film you would require a lot of
space, this in comparison with a small
thumb drive or hard drive is
comparatively nothing. Further on
storage space is the ease and ability to
upload and save a finished exported
film onto the cloud because of its digital
medium.
Further advantages is that digital is
clearly ‘future-proof’ when in
comparison with film which it’s colour
(alike with 35mm photography) begins
after time to fade and become very
washed out. Digital formats in theory
shouldn’t change over time.
The advances in technology have
lead to the digital not having to rely on
any moving parts (unlike film with the
tape mechanism). Many higher end
digital video cameras are now using
SSD’s (solid state drives) which are
made up of flash memory as opposed to
a moving hand on a hard drive and this
means that there is no vibration and the
read and write speeds are well above
that of any ordinary hard drive where a
normal hard drive would write at about
50 megabytes’s per second, a SSD drive
has the ability to write at 500
megabytes’s per second. The SSD
drives come at a disadvantage however
as they are considerably more expensive
than tape.
An obvious one is that recently
with the major advances, we have had
the ability to create Digital Video
cameras extremely cheap and can be
found on many camcorders now.
Saying this however there are a few
advantages that film has over digital
and they include the fact that film has
the ability at recording at far superior
resolutions when in comparison with
digital and also the wider dynamic
range but I still feel that digital
overweighs these but not everyone
agrees, certainly not Tarantino.
"Part of the reason I'm
feeling [like retiring] is, I
can't stand all this digital
stuff. This is not what I
signed up for"
Quentin Tarantino
Life of Pi
A 2012 movie following the story of a ship
wrecked young boy. Lead visual effects by
Rhythm & Hues Studios.