What is Live Cinema

Live Cinema is the ephemeral, communal exhibition of a cinematic narrative performed live.

The Future of Live Cinema

Who We Are

We believe the challenges and difficulty of Live Cinema are ripe for research and experimentation. We encourage other universities to help us pioneer this new medium and help us build the industry. We want to push the progression of Live Cinema through collaboration and competition with other film schools.

Follow us on YouTube for updates on our progress and research. We are always looking for others who seek to explore this new medium.

We're a bunch of college students from DePaul University experimenting with virtual production technologies. We're receiving support from the Jarvis Center for Innovation & Collaboration; and the Virtual Production program at DePaul Cinespace under the School of Cinematic Arts.

We include professionally trained theatre actors from The Theatre School at DePaul, and some of the best-trained cinematographers coming out of film schools today.

Live Cinema's Past

The Live TV of the 50's is perhaps the closest precursor to what we're wanting to do with Playhouse 90's first season in 1956. Unfortunately, the challenges of live production at the level lead to a change to recorded content following the first season.

Francis Ford Copolla's book Live Cinema and Its Techniques describes his experiments with the form working with college students at Oklahoma City Community College in 2015 and UCLA in 2016. And he is hopefully working on it right now.

Saturday Night Live isn't trying to be Live Cinema, but in many of their sketches, they demonstrate the potential.