Data World

My talk with wildlife filmmaker Dereck Joubert (see p. 22) started off technically enough. He was, after all, shooting tapeless with the Panasonic AJ-HPX3000 and using the high-end AVC-Intra 100 codec in search of a film look for a theatrical-release project. There were a lot of questions about battery life, camera weight, lensing, file-based workflow, post, storage, etc.

But before too long, we were distracted by aesthetics. Joubert is old enough to have shot film for decades; he understands very deeply the way story, light, and images play upon an audience. He knows that the actual experience of making a film ends up permeating the finished work; a documentary cut together from stock footage feels different from one that was made at the expense of hungry and exhausted humans, bad weather, and grit. I remember Danny Boyle telling me that what he envied about Apocalypse Now — and one of the things that made it so powerful to watch — was the opportunity to take an army of people up a river and drive them crazy. “You can't do that with a computer,” he said.

But now, in a way, you can. Because what is a tapeless camera if not a computer? The difference with the camera-as-computer is that it still has to be out there in the middle of the experience to be of any use. And of course, it still has to carry one of science's great analog achievements: the taking lens. So Joubert finds himself in a new place that is not so much about replacing film as navigating the possibilities between the old and new.

For him, this hybrid environment — where light meets data — is not just about replacing one tool with another. In some ways, he insists, storytelling is storytelling. But as he talks, he starts to mention the many nuanced ways in which he'll compose and time things just a little differently now — mindful of how the human eye experiences both film and HD. He understands, as any good cinematographer does, that our memories are infused with film vocabulary and the way we see real life through another analog achievement: human sight. He knows detail is a variable to be played out in service of the story.

For Joubert, tapeless digital cameras are now the most appropriate tool at the high end. His mind is made up: His film camera is “a magnificent doorstop, a beautiful hunk of metal.”

Yet his parting comment reminded me of why digital cameras are moving now out of the realm of engineering and into the flow of art. Far from a technologist, Joubert is a cinematographer. Cinematographers don't just capture something; they make something out of time-honored, ephemeral ingredients of human experience. “I think that people still respond to gravitas; and if you've done the time, if you've worked for the details and the understanding, people see and understand that in the finished work,” Joubert says. “They may not know why it moves them, but it does.”

That's a hopeful idea in a culture dominated by the spontaneity that digital cameras enable. It's left for Joubert and his colleagues to bring that tonic of gravitas to a data world.