Cinema, the primary vehicle for storytelling in the twentieth century, is being reconfigured by new media in the twenty-first. Terms such as “worldbuilding,” “virtual reality,” and “transmedia” introduce new methods for constructing a screenplay and experiencing and sharing a story. Similarly, 3D cinematography, hypercinema, and visual effects require different modes for composing an image, and virtual technology, motion capture, and previsualization completely rearrange the traditional flow of cinematic production. What does this mean for telling stories? Fast Forward answers this question by investigating a full range of contemporary creative practices dedicated to the future of mediated storytelling and by connecting with a new generation of filmmakers, screenwriters, technologists, media artists, and designers to discover how they work now, and toward what end.
From Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin’s exploration of VR spherical filmmaking to Rebeca Méndez’s projection and installation work exploring climate change to the richly mediated interactive live performances of the collective Cloud Eye Control, this volume captures a moment of creative evolution and sets the stage for imagining the future of the cinematic arts.

Holly Willis is a faculty member in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is the author of New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, the editor of The New Ecology of Things, and the cofounder of Filmmaker Magazine, dedicated to independent filmmaking.

Paperback, published in 2016, 224 pages.

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