Digital, Streaming and Citizen Cinema: 1995-2018
Toy Story and the First Computer-Generated Feature: 1995
In 1995, Pixar Animation Studios released Toy Story, the world’s first feature-length film made entirely with computer-generated animation. Directed by John Lasseter and co-produced with Disney, the film ran for 81 minutes and was generated entirely by computers — no hand-drawn frames, no physical sets, no photographed actors. Every surface, shadow, and movement was calculated by software. The film was a commercial and critical success, and it announced a new era in animated filmmaking.
A critical distinction is worth fixing in memory here: Toy Story was not the first film to use computer-generated imagery. Live-action films had been incorporating CGI elements since the 1980s, and significant milestones — the Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park achievements of the early 1990s — preceded it. What made Toy Story historically significant was that it was the first feature-length film composed entirely of computer-generated images, with no photography involved in the image-making. This distinction matters: the course identifies Toy Story as the “first computer-generated feature”, which is not the same as the “first film with CGI”.
Toy Story (1995), directed by John Lasseter at Pixar Animation Studios (co-produced with Disney), was the world’s first feature-length computer-generated animated film. It was not the first film with CGI, but the first feature composed entirely of computer-generated images.
Digital Cinematography and the DV Revolution
Alongside the rise of computer animation, the 1990s and 2000s brought a revolution in how live-action films were captured. Film stock — celluloid — had been the standard recording medium since cinema’s earliest days. It was expensive to buy, expensive to process, and limited in quantity: a director had a finite number of takes before the cost became prohibitive. Digital cinematography changed this calculation fundamentally. Digital sensors recorded to memory cards or hard drives; footage could be reviewed immediately on set; takes were essentially free. This changed the economics and culture of production.
Consumer-grade digital video (DV) cameras also began to appear in the late 1990s: small, lightweight, affordable, and capable of producing images that could be broadcast or projected. The “DV revolution” made it possible for filmmakers without studio budgets or studio equipment to produce feature-length work. Directors such as Lars von Trier used consumer DV cameras deliberately, as an aesthetic and political statement about cinema’s relationship to expensive technology. The rough, video-like quality of DV footage — its specific colour response, its softness, its visible grain in low light — became a recognisable aesthetic in independent filmmaking of the late 1990s and 2000s.
Citizen Filmmaking: Tangerine and the Smartphone
By the 2010s, smartphone cameras had reached a quality that made serious filmmaking possible on a device that fits in a pocket. The landmark moment in mainstream cinema came in 2015 with Tangerine, directed by Sean Baker. The film was shot entirely on an iPhone 5S using the Filmic Pro app and anamorphic lenses attached to the phone. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received wide critical acclaim, demonstrating that a compelling, professional-quality narrative feature could be made for a fraction of the cost of conventional film production.
Tangerine’s visual approach was partly a consequence of its shooting method. The iPhone’s wide-angle lens naturally produced a specific look: faces often filled much of the frame, backgrounds fell away into soft-focus colour, and the camera could move through the bustle of Los Angeles streets with an immediacy that a conventional film camera rig could not match. The film’s energy and intimacy were inseparable from the technology used to make it. This is a key principle: technology does not just determine what is possible; it shapes the aesthetic character of what is made.
The phrase “democratisation of production” refers to the way that digital and smartphone technology reduced the cost barrier to making films. In the era of celluloid, a feature-length film required expensive film stock, laboratory processing and specialist camera equipment — barriers that effectively restricted filmmaking to those with institutional backing. Digital cameras, editing software and smartphone devices removed most of those barriers. Anyone with a phone and a free editing app can now shoot and distribute a short film. The question this raises — relevant for Film Studies at any level — is what this means for whose stories get told and which voices get heard. Films like Tangerine told stories about communities (transgender sex workers in Los Angeles) that the Hollywood studio system had historically ignored, using equipment that the studio system would never have sanctioned.
Netflix and the Streaming Revolution
Netflix was founded in 1997 as a postal DVD rental service. In 2007, it launched its online streaming service, initially for a small catalogue of titles. Growth was rapid. By 2013 Netflix was producing its own original content; by 2016 it had over 80 million subscribers globally. In 2017, online services for film and television surpassed physical-disc sales in the United States. Physical media — first VHS, then DVD — had been the dominant home-viewing format since the 1980s; within a decade of Netflix’s streaming launch, it was secondary.
The implications for cinema were profound. Films could reach global audiences without a theatrical release; directors who might not have attracted studio backing found Netflix willing to fund adventurous projects. The traditional window between theatrical release and home viewing, which had been several months, compressed dramatically — and with the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 closed cinemas worldwide, some major releases went directly to streaming. For audiences, streaming meant access to an enormous catalogue on demand, at home, without scheduling. For the film industry, it raised questions about what “cinema” means when most viewers watch films on a laptop or phone screen.
Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007. By 2017, streaming had overtaken DVD as the primary distribution format for film and television content in the United States, fundamentally changing how audiences accessed cinema.
IMAX and the Blockbuster Spectacle: Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
At the same time as smartphone cinema was making production cheaper and more accessible, the premium end of filmmaking was pushing in the opposite direction: towards the largest, highest-resolution cameras ever used in mainstream fiction production. The IMAX format had been used in documentary and nature films since the 1970s and in selected sequences of mainstream releases from 2008. In 2018, Avengers: Infinity War, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, became the first major fiction feature to be shot entirely on IMAX cameras. Every frame was captured at the maximum resolution available, producing an image quality that could fill a six-storey screen with detail visible to the last row of the auditorium. The film was designed to be a theatrical event — an argument that cinema in a premium auditorium offers an experience categorically different from anything available at home.
Many students write that a film was “shown in IMAX” and think this is the same as saying it was “shot on IMAX cameras”. These are completely different things. Most films shown in IMAX cinemas are standard productions digitally upscaled for the large screen — the IMAX branding refers to the presentation format, not the capture format. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) was historically significant because it was the first major fiction feature shot entirely using IMAX cameras during production. The difference in image quality between footage shot on IMAX cameras and footage upscaled for IMAX projection is substantial. Do not conflate the two in exam answers.