Discussion on "Mission to Earth"

1) Using “Mission to Earth” as an example, note what is new or different about digital cinema compared totraditional filmmaking? Consider the story and appearance of the film.

The story of the traditional films is always generalized by the script. Actors perform and speak dialogues, which means both the visual and verbal elements coherently contribute to show the story. However, digital cinema broke this rule. In "Mission to Earth", there are no dialogues. The story is told by the narrator using voice over while the actor is doing what the narrator tells. This indicates that the visual and the verbal elements can be presented in different way independently. Even they have nothing to do with each other at the very moment when the narrator diverge his talking on the actor. Thus, more possibilities in emotional expression and structural organization of the story are available to filmmakers.

Besides, the footage changes at an instant, interrupted by a conspicuous pause of the motion.We can experience an operation of randomly drawing the footage that the film appears to change its chapter and content. It resembles the format of DVDs. This implies that digital cinema is more like classified footage extracting from a database and constituting a film.

The appearance of the film is also affected. As "Mission to Earth" shown, graphics are applied on the film. According to Lev Manovich, mentioned in his writing "What is Digital Cinema?",  multi-media like 3D animation, scanned pictures, processed images etc can be shown via the same medium because different visual elements are eventually transformed into "pixel" by use of various softwares. Traditional cinema cannot do that. 

The film constantly presents composite shot where different screens showing different content are seen simultaneously. The screens are distributed freely in different positions and sizes. Digital technology provides such medium that the temporal and spatial sensation are manipulated to give fresh new feeling of films.

2) What other art forms (eg film, digital art, painting, websites etc) does this film remind you of? Explain the similarity. 
The film reminds me of experimental films. Actually these films manipulate the form of the films and try to present the content in a different and subtle way apart from the main stream. This film also manipulates the form and directly shows how digital technology differs from traditional filmmaking.