Screening: "Mission to Earth"



The difference between Digital and Traditional cinema:

'Mission to Earth' is a kind of Soft Cinema. According to its definition in website, Soft Cinema project intersects software culture, cinema and architecture in a creative way. And its representation includes films, dynamic visualization and so on. 'Mission to Earth' would be a good example to show what is new or different about digital cinema compared to traditional filmmaking.

In terms of the film story, it is a science fiction allegory of the immigrant experience. Athough the story is quite boring for me, its form and construction is very creative and different to traditional filmmaking. About the narrative form, the director just use a storyteller to show to the audience what the story talking about instead of using conversation of the characters. The main characters in the film just like doing a pantomime, so it creates a sense of alienation to me. On the contrary, traditional cinema used to emphasize on conversation.

As regards the appearance of the movie, according to Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky, "it adopts the variable choices and multi-frame layout of the Soft Cinema system to represent ‘variable identity". We can see the film seperated into few squares, so that we can see different space and areas through different perspective or angles at the same time. For example, the scene both inside and outside the house are shown simultaneously. Also, the frame of the movie is comfortable and beautiful because the background colour always change and gives different moods to us. Maybe the colour changed is corresponding to the characters feeling? I'm not sure. Moreover, there are some paterns, such as circles and dots, appearing in the squares. Although sometimes I can not catch the meaning of the scene, it can decorates the general appearance of the frame and increases our imagination. Comparing to traditional cinema, digital filmmaking is more diversified and artistic.


I think the form of the movie is quite similar to comic because both of them is seperated into few squares and show different space at the same time. Moreover, it is also similar to websites since we can receive many information and visual representation in a page.


Reference: http://softcinema.net/?reload#