Circadian Cinema: Narrative Motion Pictures as a Biological Activity in Digital Filmmakin

This project, which is an attempt to analyze what distinguishes Digital Filmmaking from Hollywood, was ignited by what Siegfried Kracauer called film's inherent affinities: The Unstaged, The Fortuitous, Endlessness, The Indeterminate, and The Flow of Life. This study proposes a new theoretical and technology-based production approach that explores digital video's unique aesthetic potential and its inherent narrative affinities.

Marshall McLuhan called film and media 'extensions and amplifications of our own beings,' and that crossing or hybridizing these media can release great new forces. The coming together of film, video and digital moving pictures opens up a host of questions and issues. First of all, what are the similarities and differences between the video/digital image and the traditional analog, mechanical, photographic film formats? 

What are the implications of the differences in the mind of the viewer? What are the possibilities for a new production model given the seemingly certain transition to digital cinema? What should remain of the traditional, and what will be lost in the transition? As McLuhan put it, a time like this offers an especially favorable opportunity to take heed of the structural properties of these varying media.

Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme95 called for a doing away with tradition and a search for the new on a personal level. The Circadian Cinema Model for digital narrative production can potentially signal a paradigm shift toward a renewed understanding, and become a fresh production model for the next wave of Narrative Cinema. This decidedly grandiose and comprehensive approach is viable only under the assumption that each medium has a specific nature, which invites certain kinds of communications. Looking back and rooting ourselves in the traditions of motion pictures will provide the ground upon which we may plant our antennae.