How has new technology influenced production, marketing and exhibition in the film industries in the last 30 years?

Quite simply new technology has blasted apart the media industry and it's way of doing everything in such a way that it's inconceivable to think back. Firstly if we just look at production we can see by looking at films such as StarWars Attack of the Clones, Cloverfield, The DarkKnight and especially in animated films like Wall-E. If we take StarWars II as the prime example of production we can clearly see that without modern day technology it would be impossible for them to produce such a film.

StarWars II Attack of the Clones consisted of some of the most advanced technology of it's time, if we simply look at a few clips we can see the that the huge battle scenes were created by state of the art CGI (computer-generated images) which can take hours to create just a second of it via a huge mass of computers. Furthermore many of the scenes of the character Yoda would not have been possible in the film without technology to create an virtual character, in previous episodes of the StarWars series Yoda was simply a puppet, but that would not work in this film due to some intense action scenes.

If we then look at the Wall-E it is clear without the technology we have today this film would not have come off paper, it would take a huge array of computers days, if not weeks, to compile the entire Wall-E film into one suitably sized median to enable distribution. Without computers and the special type of CGI used only by Pixar we would not see Wall-E as it is today, similar things in the past such as Toy Story, also produced by Pixar, would not be around without the huge amount of computing power at their disposal. It would have taken them literally years to draw out all the animations by hand, and even then they would not have the same quality as which the computers create.

Other noticeable technologies which have appeared over the 30 years affecting production include such things as the Green / Blue wall, enabling actors to become immersed via CGI into an entirely different world, and also allows such films as Cloverfield to display amazing monsters not possible via normal materials. However the main thing that technology has brought to the production table is the ability of having real-sized battles on the screen, 30 years previous films such as StarWars had to rely on a few extras to buff up the large battle scenes where now a 1 man actor can be repeated and create a scene with literally thousands of people on at once without a hitch.

Technology also had a huge impact on the marketing of films due to the internet being officially born as we know it today in 1991. 2 prime examples of the difference in marketing is The DarkKnight and Cloverfield. The DarkKnight itself had a huge 'propaganda' before it was even close to being released with a massive amount of clues and tricks laid throughout numerous Batman websites to add interest to the film and only give the littlest amount of information for hours worth of effort. However it proved to be a hit, 1000s of internet users worldwide joined in on the mass Batman hunt to figure out the clues and eventually got a little teaser of the joker. This shows that new technology and the speed at which we can transmit information from one person to another just increases the urge to complete a puzzel.

Likewise due to technology many teasers can now be shown everywhere at once via social networking sits such as youtube and facebook enabling a huge amount of viewers to have a peek before the film is out of production. Cloverfield used this to its advantage with no TV advertising and only a few select cinema ads it relied on the speed that word of mouth now travels and we all watched on in amazement as a film with no major actor or a very good storyline suddenly spread across the internet like wildfire.

Exhibition was also affected via new technologies via the increase in capacity of the transport of their films from VHS to DVD and now to Blu-Ray and the ability to now mass produce everything from posters to bonus material.

To conclude it is clear that new technology has had a huge impact on everything across the media industry, and it's still changing with the rate of technological advance being on average having the raw power of processing doubling every 2 years.