A Vanishing Piece of the Pi (original) (raw)
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Media Heterotopias: Digital Effects and Material Labor in Global Film Production
Duke University Press, 2018
This book challenges the widespread tendency among audiences and critics to disregard the material conditions of digital film production. Drawing on interviews with directors, producers, special effects supervisors, and other film industry workers, I trace how the rhetorical and visual emphasis on seamlessness masks the social, political, and economic realities of global filmmaking and digital labor. In films such as Avatar (2009), Interstellar (2014), and The Host (2006)—which combine live action footage with CGI to create new hybrid environments—filmmaking techniques and "seamless" digital effects allow the globally dispersed labor involved to go unnoticed by audiences. I adapt Foucault's notion of heterotopic spaces to foreground this labor and to theorize cinematic space as a textured, multilayered assemblage in which filmmaking occurs in transnational collaborations that depend upon the global movement of bodies, resources, images, and commodities. Acknowledging cinema's increasingly digitized and globalized workflow, I reconnect digitally constructed and composited imagery with the reality of production spaces and laboring bodies to highlight the political, social, ethical, and aesthetic stakes in recognizing the materiality of collaborative filmmaking.
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(Post)Production: Classifications and Infrastructures of Digital Visual Effects
This article historicizes the categorization of post-production work, specifically that of visual effects, as technical processes and “post” production in large-scale cinema production. It analyzes 1980s deregulations and the successive vertical integration strategies performed by studios to increase their control over distribution. The economic model of the contemporary blockbuster built upon concentrated studio control to redistribute the production of spectacle away from high-cost “creative” labor and into an expansive infrastructure of visual effects production that was more easily controllable and exploitable for central profit. An examination of visual effects classifications in the recent criticism on blockbusters by Kristen Whissel and Sean Cubitt will suggest that while visual effects function as primary components of textual design, we need to reconfigure how we describe this central component of filmmaking to shift the interests of its underlying infrastructure away from systemic profit and back to the human worker.
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Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor
Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges confronting actors, editors, electricians, and others. The authors take on pressing conceptual and methodological issues while also providing insightful case studies of workplace dynamics regarding creativity, collaboration, exploitation, and cultural difference. Furthermore, it examines working conditions and organizing efforts on all six continents, offering broad-ranging and comprehensive analysis of contemporary screen media labor in such places as Lagos, Prague, Hollywood, and Hyderabad. The collection also examines labor conditions across a range of job categories that includes, for example, visual effects, production services, and adult entertainment. With contributions from such leading scholars as John Caldwell, Vicki Mayer, Herman Gray, and Tejaswini Ganti, Precarious Creativity offers timely critiques of media globalization while also intervening in broader debates about labor, creativity, and precarity.
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How Global Is Hollywood? Division of Labor from a Prop-Making Perspective
Production Studies II: Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries, eds. M. Banks, B. Conor & V. Mayer (New York: Routledge, 2015)
This chapter takes political economy’s view on below the line work in U.S. runaway productions as a starting point for ethnographical observations regarding the sociomaterial construction of the film studio as workspace. It shows how the “biography” of props intersect with the working lives of prop-makers, and how aesthetical artifacts co-organize the production process.
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Location and labor: critical crossroads in global film and television
Creative Industries Journal, 2014
I approached the editorial prompt as an opportunity to work through some of the concerns driving my current research on creative labor in emergent or ‘peripheral’ media hubs, centers of production activity outside established media capitals that are nevertheless increasingly integrated into a global production apparatus. It builds from my research on the role that film, television and digital media production have played in the economic and cultural strategies of Glasgow, Scotland, and extends the focus on media work to other locations, including Prague and Budapest. I am particularly drawn to the spatial dynamics at play in these locations and how local producers, writers, directors and crew negotiate a sense of place and creative identity against the flows and counter-flows of capital and culture. This means not only asking questions about the growing ensemble of people, places, firms and policies that make international productions possible, but also studying the more quotidian relationships between media workers and the locations (both near and far) where they now find work. I do not see these tasks as unrelated. On the one hand, such queries underscore how international production depends on a growing constellation of interchangeable parts and is facilitated by various actors whose agendas may or may not converge. On the other hand, these questions also betray an even more complicated dynamic, a process that is shifting the spatial orientation of both location and labor around uneven and contested scales. As local industries reimagine themselves as global players, media practitioners are caught up in a new geography of creative labor: not only are personnel finding it increasingly necessary to hop from place to place to follow the work, but also place itself is changing, as locations morph into nebulous amalgamations of tax rebates, subsidized facilities, production services and (when it still matters) natural beauty.
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Behind the Scenes: Production, Animation, and Postmodern Value
I wish to explore certain irreconcilable positions which various representative intellectual figures (Baudrillard and Zizek, among others) have assumed on ‘labour’ as an image to be either repressed from or paraded throughout postmodern culture -- positions which mediate obscure and difficult questions concerning the production of value itself in our society. In order to begin thinking these questions in their real complexity, I want to conduct a rapid tour through some recent attempts, in film and fiction, to map the emergence of value in a society driven by a ‘spectacular’ array of commodities from which all traces of production have been erased, and yet still necessarily tied, at however many removes, to the ‘anonymous workers sweating in Third World factories’ without whom, presumably, the entire system would collapse. The texts I want to survey are David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (Japan, 1998), Mark J. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Olivir Assayas’ demonlover (France, 2002), and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003). My task will be to analyse these attempts at the level of symbolic activity, clumsy and provisional as they may be, to reconnect the products of our ‘simulacrum’ with the realm of ‘material, industrial production’. If any such symbolic attempt has indeed been successful, then it should direct some urgently needed light back on the seemingly imponderable question of value in our world today.
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