ABSTRACT
Perhaps it was inevitable. The digitization of cinema began in the 1980s in the realm of special visual effects. By the early 1990s, digital sound was widely propagated in most theaters and digital nonlinear editing began to supplant linear editing systems for post-production. “By the end of the 1990s, filmmakers such as George Lucas had begun using digital cameras for original photography and, with the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1999, Lucas spearheaded the advent of digital projection in motion picture theatres” (Belton, 2013, p. 417). As if lamenting the digital shift in cinematic storytelling, Poster states that, “…this technological overlay I’m talking about has made a century-old process (light meters, film dailies, lab color timing) that was once [invisible] to everyone but the camera team, visible and accessible to virtually anyone.… It is a loud wake-up call for the entire industry” (2012, p. 6).
