Media arts

Montage editing, animation principles, and flicker fusion

What are the media arts?

The media arts are art forms built around modern recording and digital technology — film, animation, and video games — each combining elements of the visual, audio, and literary arts covered elsewhere in this section into something genuinely new, made possible by specific technology.

Film language

Film communicates using a specific visual vocabulary. Different shot types (a wide shot showing a full scene, a close-up focusing tightly on a face or detail) convey different information and emotional emphasis. Editing — how individual shots are selected and joined together — shapes a film's pacing, meaning, and emotional impact, often as significantly as anything captured within an individual shot itself.

Animation

Animation creates the illusion of movement by displaying a rapid sequence of slightly different still images, exploiting how human vision processes closely spaced still images as continuous motion. Animation ranges from traditional hand-drawn frame-by-frame work to modern computer-generated techniques, but all forms share this same underlying principle of rapidly sequenced still images.

Video games

Video games are a distinctly interactive art form: unlike film or animation, which a viewer experiences passively in a fixed, predetermined sequence, a video game's audience actively participates, with their choices and actions directly shaping what happens next. This interactivity is what most fundamentally distinguishes games from every other art form covered in this section.

Why the media arts matter

The media arts have become among the most widely consumed and culturally influential art forms of the modern era, combining visual, audio, and narrative elements in ways only possible through modern recording, animation, and computing technology, and continuing to evolve rapidly alongside that underlying technology.