Digital Departures: Television Institutions and Low-Budget Production

Abstract

At the turn of the 21st century, digital technology was gradually providing new production techniques, delivery models and exhibition platforms for film and television, causing anxiety and exhilaration about the futures of both mediums. Two broad schools of thought on digital cinema emerged. The first optimistically heralded a new age of audiovisual capability, both in terms of enabling expensive, breathtaking special effects and because the new availability of cheap but reasonable-quality equipment allegedly ‘democratized’ filmmaking. The second school was apprehensive about the potential for digital technologies and effects to overtake ‘traditional’ celluloid filmmaking, and particularly the loss of analogue ‘indexicality’; renewed cries of ‘the death of cinema’ resulted. It is difficult to look at the emergence of digital technology with any retrospective clarity, given that there are good reasons to suppose that the moment has not yet passed. However, among the doom and enthusiasm, it is clear that responses to digital filmmaking have tended to be culturally and industrially specific. By contrast to Hollywood cinema’s use of computers to generate artificial worlds and events in movie spectacles:

in Britain, the advances in digital technology have been primarily regarded as a new opportunity for stimulating low-budget film production, and consequently a number of new funding schemes have been introduced in part to nurture projects which could take advantage of the new possibilities.¹