This concept is moving from the camera into the editing room because now more and more with software we are able to manipulate that distance later on. We could always do it even with film, but it was cumbersome and very expensive. Now it is something that you can do very easily and there are developments now, something called the [visual] field camera is being made available. You can buy it now for movies. I think it costs $150,000 so it's whatever that is – four times more expensive than the RED camera or the Panavision camera. But the field camera simply takes data at the time of filming, and you decide later where you want the focus to be, you decide later even what lens you want to use. You can make it telephoto or make it a wide-angle lens after the fact. You can change the framing very easily. You can even determine where you want the information to cease as a function of distance and probably many other things as well. So, if I'm photographing you who are perhaps... the back of you is maybe 8' 2.5” from me, the camera, I can say later anything that's further away than 8' 2.5” turn into nothing. Basically, it turns into a green screen. In fact, it's better than a green screen because it doesn't have a colour at all, it's just raw emulsion, so to speak, ready to have something else put there. So, right now, rather than a wall and a window, we could put the Amazon jungle behind you, just like that which is of a piece with everything that is happening and happening increasingly rapidly. That shooting a film, people are even starting to say, rather than shooting, we are... this is a period of acquisition which sounds like, I don't know, some kind of... the thrust of empire. We are 'acquiring' this and later we will decide what we want to do with it. Which has always, sort of, been the case, but now the decision level of what we are able to do is now at the level of the individual pixels out of which the image can later be constructed. With implications about what filmmaking is, and where decisions are made and what the Director of Photography is. You can change lighting, even, later. I mean, it's mind boggling. And it may be that it will now take 20 years to finish a film, because everything that you have to decide, you will decide later! And then, it all has to work together. I don't know. It's a brave new world! And, I'm looking at it with interest and, even participating in it up to a point, but there's... we're punting the ball down the field in a big way now, and we don't know yet what the implications of all of this are going to be.
