EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director - multimedia authoring software - Evaluation

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by David Goldberg

As prescient as Cage was, he could not foresee that the flexibility and multiplicity of the digitized frame would cause it to lose some of the geometric and mechanical rigor of its cinematic analogue. In his day, a frame was not something that one could name, or intentionally jump to or away from; nor could it contain an entire sequence of events in itself, or make decisions based on an awareness of its own contents. Logically, a frame consists of multiple channels: two for sound, one hundred and fifty for separate graphical elements, one for the frame-rate, one for programming logic and another for a color palette. In Director, every frame is an index of properties that describes the state of all the channels that are associated with it. The duration of an element's "existence" or a property's effect is determined by how many frames of the score it occupies.

The score is a visual representation of the changes that occur from one frame to the next, whether they were interpolated by Director or made manually. Any visible results of these changes appear on Director's stage. Naturally, the illusion of motion is created when a graphical element gradually changes its position from frame to frame, while more drastic changes can emulate cinematic edits. This can be combined with other types of media such as digital video, whose frame-rates can be interactively adjusted independent of the movie that is presenting them. This kind of flexibility is impossible in film, and it both complicates and extends Cage's notion of a frame-based system. This can be illustrated in Director by setting up a movie that loops on exactly one frame, with several digital videos occupying different channels. Regardless of the movie's overall frame-rate, each digital video obeys its own internal frame-rate. Depending on their content, this arrangement could create a visual composition whose audi o equivalent might be produced by a set of (say, 12) radios being tuned at random.

> Stage.Sprite.Cliche

Setting aside Cage's pre-digital clairvoyance for a moment, we turn to philosopher Glues Deleuze's description of the cinematic frame as an information system, a "set which has a great number of parts, that is of elements, which themselves form subsets." (2) He treated film as a storage medium upon which the data in front of the camera is recorded in discrete moments. For Deleuze, the actors, locations, sets, lighting, sound, angles, durations and special effects all constitute the information in the frame. This makes it legible, and something that bears potential meaning for the viewer. In Director, the stage is analogous to the outermost or whole cinematic frame. It is where things happen. In the simplest example, a lone digital video or an animated sequence playing on Director's stage could be a subject of Deleuze's Informational cinematic analysis. The multiple-video example discussed above would be a more complex instance, and reflects Deleuze's further characterizations of the frame. Its contents can be rarefied or saturated; that is, changes in the density of a frame's elements inform as much as the elements themselves. The information in a cinematic frame can also be geometrically divided by croppings, transitions, architectural elements like windows, doors, and walls, and even by light and shadow. It can be dynamically determined as well, by varying intensities and gradations of light, motion, transformation and arrangement--in short, morphing. Deleuze completes his characterization of the informational capacities of the frame by emphasizing the out-of-field, a strange space of implication beyond the frame that can influence how its elements are perceived.