Reading Response: Gill Brandston & Lev Manovich

The article written by Gill Branston was an interesting read about Semiotics and how our communication through language, and various other signifiers have become what it is today. Taking Design, I was relatively unfamiliar with the topics that have been touched in the two texts. It definitely left me with a more open perspective how how I could approach different tasks on how to communicate towards the viewer. Branston talked about Semiotics, explaining how meanings are constructed with the language that we’ve created for ourselves. With the conceptual and physical elements that contribute to the ‘give’ and ‘take’ process of communication, it was so intriguing that even though language has played such a vital part in making a sense of things, there are so many grey areas that leaves it not entirely accurate. It’s already incredibly difficult understand the human psyche, but to pin point the origins of how we describe things and create relations between different cultures is a phenomenon I have yet to comprehend. The section where it talks about colour and its denotations raises the importance of how our visual response  to our surroundings; because of its importance, colour itself has become an important language.

‘What is Digital Cinema?’ communicates the development and history of cinematography, and how its developments have interacted with various medias over the years. This notion of the “interactive narrative” has been a concept that the majority of viewers have been fascinated with. With the growth of technology over that space of time has greatly influenced the trends of cinematography’s ‘identity’. Before, it used to just tell a story, but now just telling a story is not good enough; we see how movies nowadays remove themselves from reality, both narratively and physically (with the introduction to computer generated animations etc. capturing live action film from a camera). Cinematography has that power to communicate a different reality that we can be a part of and enjoy. As much as I appreciate and enjoy the films that were created digitally, I do hope that in the distant future, the art of manual and traditional cinematography is not forgotten.