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This chapter studies the aesthetic transformations accompanying the technological shift in the late 1990s, focusing on two films widely identified as watersheds for digital cinema: George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999) and Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration (1998). The pervasive and intricate use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in The Phantom Menace not only provoked a sense of awe in terms of its technological excellence, but also addressed contemporary concerns with the boundaries of human life, inviting viewers to marvel at its devaluation. While The Phantom Menace's use of CGI allows for the proliferation of detail, The Celebration's use of consumer-grade digital video cameras produces a low-resolution aesthetic, especially in long shots and low-light situations.

Amateur women film makers expressed their changing role in society, sense of selfhood and being in the world through film. It enabled them to negotiate the complexities of class, inheritance, status, authority, geography, convention and modernity. These films are part of the twentieth century's unofficial visual histories yet until recently they have been largely neglected in Britain’s public and private collections. This discussion sets women's filmmaking against wider histories of gender, social, economic, cultural and geo-political change. This framing allows the authors to discuss film production in Britain's contrasting national and colonial settings, to question subjectivities, probe at meanings and rework assumptions and expectations associated with British ways of life in and beyond the final decades of colonialism. Discussion introduces case-studies, methodologies and related literature so that readers may follow the broadly chronological structure of subsequent chapters and individual topics. Relevant archival sources related to colonial and British-based film making are identified, as are the specialist magazines for amateur film enthusiasts and the organisational support available via cine clubs and the Institute of Amateur Cinematography. Interdisciplinary and intentionally offering different interpretative approaches, this introductory overview offers a framework for reading on and a springboard of ideas for further research.

This chapter briefly outlines the technological advancements in the fields of color, display, camera, and digital imaging techniques; it then demonstrates the early history along with the scientific principles involved in the pixel concept. The chapter also explains the charge-coupled device and a complementary metal oxide semiconductor, the new technologies of the latest digital cameras. It describes the transformation of the pixel from a grid-like thing to super-higher resolutions and discusses lighting technology. The chapter also discusses the concept of bitmaps and its relationship with pixel.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of The Blair Witch Project (1999). The Blair Witch Project, with its tiny budget and horror genre trappings, was the tenth biggest box office earner of 1999. Even with strong competition in the horror genre, the film managed to stand out from the rest. The Blair Witch Project was arguably a product of its time more than any other film of the 1990s. It signalled the approaching end of an era and spectacularly heralded the advent of digital filmmaking. Backed up by an internet marketing campaign, The Blair Witch Project became a glowing example of what could be achieved with cheap emerging technology, imagination, and a ‘less is more’ approach. By the year 2000, and due to the influx of digital video cameras, there were far more independent features being made than ever before. This book explores the aesthetics of The Blair Witch Project, how identification is encouraged in the film, and the way it successfully creates fear in contemporary audiences.

Based on the practical experiences of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, this chapter responds to ideas presented in this section concerning disruptive health innovation and privacy. Using case studies in the development of health-related and non-health consumer products, the text describes how common attitudes about the primacy of professional health expertise retards innovation, and argues that true disruption must come from outside the formal medical establishment. The text also describes why product-level privacy controls for users, while important, may provide little actual value and therefore involve difficult tradeoffs for developers—a lot of effort for functionality that is demanded but unlikely to be used or useful.

This chapter analyzes the application of Benford's law to pictures taken from nature with a digital camera. Considering that many natural phenomena seem to follow Benford's law and that images are often nothing but “snapshots of nature,” it is pertinent to wonder whether images (at least those taken from nature) obey Benford's law. While the values output by the image capture device embedded in the camera, i.e., the pixels, do not follow Benford's law, this chapter shows that if they are transformed into a domain that better approximates the human visual system then the resulting values satisfy a generalized form of Benford's law. This can be used for image forensic applications, such as detecting whether an image has been modified to carry a hidden message (steganography) or has been compressed with some loss of quality.

Many lawyers and judges are uneasy when speaking about technology. They bemoan the jargon of technologists, oblivious to the irony that legal experts are greatly superior purveyors of jargon. One of the difficulties here is that technology can be discussed at different levels. When some people talk about technology, for example, they are discussing particular systems that they use, packages and apps, such as PowerPoint and Twitter. This is not a book about packages and apps. Others speak about more general, enabling technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, natural language processing, and blockchain. I say quite a lot about various enabling technologies in the pages that follow because a failure to grasp their impact is to fail to grasp how court service is likely to change.

More people in the world now have access to the internet than access to justice. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), only 46 per cent of human beings live under the protection of the law, whereas more than 50 per cent of people are now active users of the internet in one way or another. Annually, one billion people are said to need ‘basic justice care’ but in ‘many countries, close to 30 per cent of problem-owners do not even take action’. As for public funding of legal and court services, it was found in a leading global study of legal aid, involving 106 countries, that around one-third ‘have not yet enacted specific legislation on legal aid’ and that the ‘demand for legal aid for civil cases is largely unmet in most countries.’4 Meanwhile, the courts of some jurisdictions are labouring under staggering backlogs—for example, 100 million cases in Brazil (as noted), and 30 million in India. Even in those legal systems that are described as ‘advanced’, court systems are under-resourced, and the resolution of civil disputes invariably takes too long, costs too much, and the process is unintelligible to ordinary people. The broad case for change is self-evident—in varying degrees, the court systems of our world are inaccessible to the great majority of human beings.