Miriam Loertscher

Zürcher Hochschule der Künste | ZHdK · Department of Performing Arts and Film

Due to the rapid pace of digitalization, Virtual Production (VP) in film is gaining importance. With this gamified production process, live-action and computer graphics can be combined in real-time while filming on set. This paper focuses on an interdisciplinary research project that investigates the effects of VP on visual aesthetics, on the chang...

This study aimed to examine whether the cortical processing of emotional faces is modulated by the computerization of face stimuli (”avatars”) in a group of 25 healthy participants. Subjects were passively viewing 128 static and dynamic facial expressions of female and male actors and their respective avatars in neutral or fearful conditions. Event...

The ongoing research project Gadgets, Phones and Drones at the Zurich University of the Arts investigates how innovations in camera technology have affected the visual aesthetics of documentary films since the 1990s. With specially produced variants of short films, historical paradigm shifts are being subjected to contemporary comparative analyses....

Computer-generated characters, so-called avatars, are widely used in advertising, entertainment, human-computer interaction, or as research tools to investigate human emotion perception. However, brain responses to avatar and human faces have scarcely been studied to date. As such, it remains unclear whether dynamic facial expressions of avatars ev...

Today, cinema is digital: 95 percent of all movie theatres worldwide are equipped with digital projection, and, to an overwhelmingly high degree, the films are shot with digital cameras. But still, among filmmakers and critics, the debate on whether photochemical film stock and mechanical projection of film prints are aesthetically superior continu...

The digital revolution changed film production in many ways. Until the end of the 20th century, most film professionals and critics preferred celluloid film. However, no previous empirical study compared complete narrative films recorded with analog and digital cinematography. Three short narrative films were produced with an analog and a digital c...

Although motion is a defining feature of moving images, it is also one of their most problematic aspects due to blurred or partially stuttering images (strobe effect) at the standard frame rate of 24 frames per second (fps). This research was conducted to test the aesthetic and perceptual consequences of higher frame rates in narrative films. In a...