Technology in Films

Technology in Films

Introduction

Modern technology has changed the traditional way of living. It has introduced many things new in our lives. For example, digital art and animation refers to the use of computer-generated visual imaging techniques, which are used most prominently in the film and computer game industries. It also refers to the use of simulated graphics, rendering, and image manipulation in art installations, software, and interface design. Computer graphics, the use of computers to create and process images, is an essential part of human-computer interaction (HCI) and a central part of contemporary visual culture. Artists have been capturing their imagination on paper in static form for many centuries, but in the space of just a few decades, computer scientists have mastered the art of representing images in a dynamic, digital form that can be continually transformed in any number of imaginative ways (Kyng and Mathiassen, 1997). From architecture to choreography and graphic design to typography, it is almost impossible to find a twenty-first-century creative discipline that has not been touched by computer graphics (Pickover, 1991). But the transformation of everyday HCI has been even more fundamental, with green-screen text-only displays now consigned to history by graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

Concepts

The key concept in computer graphics is the representation of an “analog” piece of visual information (a picture made up from a potentially infinite number of brush strokes in any number of colors or gray shades) in a digital format (a table of numbers chosen from a set of fixed values). The advantage to the digital format is that, while a picture drawn on paper is essentially a static item that can be changed only with difficulty; a digital image can be repeatedly transformed by applying various algorithms (predefined mathematical processes) to the stored numbers. For example, an image can be “mirrored” simply by reversing the order of the numbers that represent it, or doubled in size by repeating every number in the table.

Computer-graphic systems have much in common with television displays, (Kyng and Mathiassen, 1997) in which pictures are built up from thousands of individual dots or squares by electron guns scanning systematically across a phosphor-coated screen. Raster graphics, as this process is called, is very different from an earlier (and much more expensive) form of computer imaging known as vector graphics, in which pictures were built up by plotting successive lines between coordinates a little like the trace on ...