Popular cinema has all but replaced the theatre. At one time, film-making was a laborious and time-consuming process that involved stuntmen, costly locales and grand settings. A significant time of the film director would have gone into coordinating the sequences on the sets. With film making embracing digital, the film director can focus more on the script and storytelling ability of the film. Digital has changed filmmaking for the better and changed it for good.

How has digital changed filmmaking?

Usage of digital cameras: Not only has use of digital cameras slashed the cost of filmmaking, but also democratised the creation of film content. It is not unthinkable today for a movie to be shot wholly by using a movie camera or a handy camera. With technology making filmmaking so easy, the focus has shifted to creativity and originality. No wonder Indian movies are a rage world over.

Advanced film-editing software: From editing being a painstaking manual process, it has become a considerably easy process with the availability of top-rate software. It also enables the editor who wants to create realistic cinema to merge film produced using a non-digital camera with sequences shot using a digital camera.

Ease of film distribution: Where once producers had to manually and gradually release films across cinemas, using satellite channel, they can now be distributed in a digital format.

Combating piracy: While internet movie piracy brings down the profits of movie makers, things are still better compared to movie piracy in the pre-digital days. There are watchers on the net who track down the movies uploaded on various sites and take them down. Quality versions of the movies are encrypted and can only be decrypted by projectors in cinemas.

Use of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI): Movie makers generously use CGI to create settings, stunts, special effects and recreate locations not only producing more immersive films but also saving in a big way in terms of costly settings and stuntmen. While this slightly dents the authenticity of films, filmmakers by and large have been using their discretion in deploying it.

Use of Virtual Reality: While it is still in a nascent stage, films have begun to adopt virtual reality. Case in point: India’s first virtual reality (VR) film, the short documentary “Right To Pray” has premiered at Toronto Film Festival. It is based on the event of barring women into temples and creates an immersive 3D setting where the audiences are visually transported to the locations accessed by devotees and activists.

Social media and apps for promotion: Film makers have used channels like YouTube to upload teasers and jukeboxes of their film music to draw audiences. They actively use social media to engage audiences prior to the movie release, pique their interest, eventually converting them into movie watchers. Some of them are creating gaming apps that are built on the movie related themes to connect with audiences at a deeper level. Filmmakers can also use the audience feedback to improve the quality of their cinema.

Digital created new opportunities

With growing internet and smartphone penetration, India has seen a huge shift in watching preferences towards the mobile medium. Today, films of all sizes are being created and optimised for various form factors because digital has expanded the scope of filmmaking. Technology brought an uptick in international film viewing, which means that audiences get to raise the benchmark for Indian films. It also means that there is a growing need of script writers, directors, producers and promoters. So, technology has clearly increased the opportunities for creating.

What is the future of digital filmmaking?

According to DefIndia, crowdsourcing is the future of filmmaking. Amazon is putting scripts online and letting the crowd vote for the stories they would like to see made into a series, and the ones with the most votes are the ones that actually get made. One Indian startup that bring audiences and filmmakers together to raise funds for films on the lines of Indiegogo and Kickstarter is Wishberry. Crowdsourcing is only going to democratize filmmaking further, probably even exponentially so.