Post-production

This is the first element of film-making to be transformed by the digital revolution. It is now extremely rare for any film or television programme to be post-produced in anything but a digital format. Editing technologies such as Avid and LightWorks have had as fundamental an effect on film cutting techniques as word processors have had on the treatment of the written word. Opinions are divided as to their effect - many believe desktop editing has been a liberating force, allowing editors to view multiple options far more quickly, and to explore the possibilities of those options to the full. Others think the new technologies distance the editor from the traditional rhythms of film montage, and are partly to blame for an over-reliance on rapid-fire editing at the expense of a more considered style. Whichever is true (and there's probably truth in both), the days of physically cutting and pasting a film together are receding into history.

Effects

We still think of digital effects as the province of big-budget Hollywood movies such as The Phantom Menace and The Matrix, but as the technology becomes cheaper, film-makers are using effects in increasingly subtle ways to manipulate elements within the frame, removing unwanted mistakes, adding subtle touches, changing lighting, adjusting framing, and so on. Film has always involved the sophisticated manipulation of reality to produce an image on a screen, with techniques such as back projection, glass shots and blue screen. But the advent of computer generated imagery (CGI) in the last 20 years has fundamentally altered the way we think about the filmed image. With film-makers increasingly asking "can we CGI it?", it is possible to imagine a not-too-distant future in which the original filmed image is just a rough draft, subject to alteration in the same way that recorded sound is currently massaged, refined and reconstructed for the finished product. Film has always inhabited a paradoxical space between photographic realism and dreamlike fantasy. New technologies may ensure a defining shift to the latter.

Animation

While 3D animation a la Toy Story is one of the great success stories of the 1990s, animation is at the crossroads of many of the converging strands of digital image-making. This can be seen in interactive technology such as Website and games design (one of the short "films" screening at Darklight is derived from the best-selling game, Abe's Exoddus), in the increasingly blurred area between live-action and special effects, or in the revitalisation of traditional animation through an increasingly sophisticated blending of "classical" techniques and new technologies, as seen in recent features by Disney and DreamWorks. On television, small companies are producing impressive graphics which often outshine the main programmes (in Ireland, Image Now's inserts for TV3 are a prime example).

Camera

Switch on your television this evening, and you'll soon come across a digitally-recorded image. Digital cameras are rapidly supplanting the older analogue videotape formats, for obvious reasons - they're smaller, cheaper, easier to operate, and they deliver a better image. The proliferation of fly-on-the-wall "reality" programming across the channels is due in no small part to the arrival of digital cameras. In cinemas, 1999 has seen the arrival of the first internationally-acclaimed digital feature, in the form of Thomas Vinterberg's Festen/The Celebration, while this year's Dublin Film Festival saw two features shot on digital by Irish directors (Park and Break Even). Will digital cameras be the tools that allow film-makers to bypass the stultifying requirements of mainstream film-financing? Perhaps, but similar claims were made in the past for Super-8, 16-millimetre and analogue video, and it never quite happened.

Exhibition/distribution

The process of making multiple film prints in a processing laboratory, then shipping them out to cinemas all over the world, where they are unspooled on a projector for the benefit of a paying audience, has remained essentially unchanged for most of this century. There are obvious cost benefits to be gained if, for example, it becomes possible to broadcast cinema-quality pictures and sound via satellite to cinemas across the planet. Multinational leisure conglomerates and EU-funded programmes have been investigating potential digital cinema systems for years. Equally, the potential of wideband and Internet broadcasting is just beginning to be explored, and the move to digital broadcasting over the next 10 years will completely redefine the way we think about television.