“Softspace” and Hybrid Images: Animated World as Media Interface in Speed Racer
Abstract: This paper aims at theorizing the ways in which today’s software-generated feature filmmaking creates the space for reassembling a very rich set of heterogeneous media images, by examining Speed Racer, directed by the the Wachowski brothers in collaboration with John Gaeta, in terms of demonstrating how a software-driven representation plays an integral part in combining and structuring multiple ways of image making—2D photographic image, 3D computer graphic imagery, 2D motion graphics, lens-based video image, and simulated image. I would argue that the computer-generated frame for animating different media images needs to be articulated under a new spatial parameter for movement—what I would call “softspace.”
Biographical Statement: Ji-hoon Kim is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU, where he is currently working on a dissertation entitled “Intermedia Arts and the Moving Image: Photography, Film, Video, and the Digital.” His research interests include film/media theory, experimental film and video, expanded cinema, and digital moving images. His essays will be published in the 50th anniversary issue of Screen (Spring 2009) and two anthologies, Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (eds., Rosalnd Galt and Karl Schoonover, Oxford University Press) and The Place of the Moving Image (eds. John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel, University of Minnesota Press).
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