ANALOG/DIGITAL: The Emotional Impact of Film Recording Processes on the Audience

The film industry is currently undergoing a radical upheaval: analog technology, which has existed for over a century, is being replaced by digital procedures. However, the effects of this shift on reception have remained largely unexplored to date. The interdisciplinary project ANALOG/DIGITAL involved the simultaneous production of three short feature films using digital and analog cameras. This lead to two versions of each film, which differ only as regards how the films were shot. A third version was created in postproduction, aimed at giving the digital version an analog look as best as possible. In a next step, the effects of the various versions on a test audience were compared. Project work explored how such differences could be perceived in the first place, whether and how exactly the specific features of the analog image alter audience experience, and to what extent postproducing the digital film achieves effects comparable to the analog version. At the center of the investigation was the question of the extent to which the difference is perceived at all, whether the specific characteristics of the analog image are expressed in a changed experience of narrative films for the spectator, and to what extent, if necessary, this effect may be altered through subsequent processing of digital film. Also to be studied was whether a significant difference could be observed between test subjects who grew up with analog cinema and familiar with the traditional recording processes, on the one hand, and so-called “digital natives” on the other, who were born after 1980 and thus socialized predominantly with digital images. The talk will present a short excerpt from one of these films and first results of the detailed and methodical investigation.