EA2013 03 Virgil Widrich

Expanded Animation 2013
Virgil Widrich (AT)
Presentation: in/out —digital/analog. Images between digital realism and analog believability

Analog film technologies, which for more than a century made it possible to create previously unseen images in motion, have almost entirely disappeared over the past few years. They have been replaced by digitally produced images that are generated by a small set of tools that dominate the market, and despite the nearly endless possibilities provided, they all look remarkably similar. Rather than simply focusing on the future and attempting to optimize the software-based animation of hair and fi reballs, a look back to the past can also be quite valuable. The combination of analog and digital technologies, using a reiterative process of “in” and “out”—from analog to digital—provides a treasure trove of methods to create new images that forgo the demands of realism and become believable precisely due to their abstraction.