by Rachel Clarke and Claudia Hart
Non-linear video editing systems permit time to be arranged and
rearranged a-sequentially along a timeline, permitting the aesthetic of
cinematic montage. Post-photographic 3D software programs are able to
produce more complex synchronous and asynchronous time loops, intervals,
and durations that derive from the recursive digital logic native to
computer programming. In a virtual world, both linear and nonlinear time
can coexist, and multiple rates of time can unfold within a single
unified XYZ space, vastly extending the possibilities of the cinematic.
3D digital cinema distinguishes itself from classical animation in that
the illusion of movement does not actually originate from the linear
unfolding of sequential images. Use of timeline-independent nested
animation blocks is one of many significant differences between
simulations technologies and earlier forms of animation. Physical
processes are both generated and simulated within the virtual world
itself. What makes 3D cinema different from non-linear video editing
conceptually, is that EVERYTHING can have its own independent timeline.
Once a virtual world is designed and physical simulations have been set
up, these timeline-independent nesting processes can appear to unfold
along a linear, frame-based timeline.
Once simulated, post-photographic cinema can be recorded and rendered
out as a sequence of images that are played back in the same manner as
any other piece of cinema or flip-book style animation.
In a virtual world, a user can simulate the growth cycles of plants, the
emissions of vapors or smoke, the raging of a fire, the behavior of
liquids and bodies of water, how light may react to materials, and a
range of physical forces like gravity and wind, including the way that
these forces might move solid objects. These processes can unfold at
different rates but within a unified Cartesian space, accelerating or
slowing at different speeds and velocities. The motion of an object can
also be cycled, duplicated, offset or looped, or allowed to develop or
decay logarithmically, to create patterns in what might otherwise appear
to be naturalistic movement recorded by an analog camera.
All of these aspects create the sense of a magical, uncanny space in
which events appear to be asynchronous and where bizarre juxtapositions
of processes with impossible durations rupture any sense of regularity
in the Euclidean time-space continuum. Such time-collages create a sense
of being a temporal paradox. Although virtual simulations may unfold
along a single linear timeline moving in a forward direction, one
perceptually experiences contradictions to the idea that time might be
continuous as result of cycling, looping, and the contradictory rates
that events and processes are able to unfold. This endows a sense that
multiple layers of time might exist simultaneously. A sort of bending
and folding of time is yet another way that a virtual world may become
conceptually "impossible" and because of this, endlessly fascinating
despite a normalized photographic sense of the real.