300

The Plannersphere Ning just hit 300 members! Exciting! Bravely we shall hold back the forces of evil until the rest of the industry can be convinced to pick up arms!

No, seriously, thanks to everyone for getting involved. Hopefully people are finding it useful - if anyone has any suggestions as to how to make it more so - post something to the Ning.

By a complete coincidence I also happen to have just seen 300 and I thought it was fantastic. Despite not being a big fan of gore / violence / war movies, I was blown away. I know I'm a sucker for interesting animation / film crossovers, but I really think there is something interesting happening at the opposite end of the filmic spectrum from the Dogme school -  thinking of film as a composite medium, not a way to represent reality.

[ Of course, film has long been pushing the boundaries of reality, but CGI has usually been employed to make the fantastical seem real, rather than simply ignoring reality and crafting your own vision. Hollywood has always seemed more comfortable with magical realism than it has been with starting with a representational tabula rasa. I imagine there are practical considerations that come into play here - CGI is expensive. ]

This begins to play into ideas of hyperreality, where you can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and as CGI become ever more sophisticated we will no doubt reach a point where, on-screen, there will be no way to pick out the digital from the real, like Gibson's Idoru.

In 300 Miller uses the unreliable narrator device to blend historical fact with fantastical flourishes, but increasingly, as the cost of CGI falls, how you portray 'reality' on the screen will be a matter of choice.

And when we all have retinal projectors to overlay data on to the world, creating dynamic and individuals HUDs, how we experience reality will be as well. But that's another post.