(Post)Production: Classifications and Infrastructures of Digital Visual Effects

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Post-production
• Cinema
• Blockbuster
• Visual Effects
• Infrastructure

ORCID

Allain Daigle http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0109-1576

Notes

1. This is perhaps one of the reasons that workflow, the organization of work tasks, is so frequently discussed in trade press publications such as Post Magazine, StudioDaily, and Art of the Guillotine.

2. Frameworks more attentive to the draw of sensation in media form, such as Tom Gunning’s (1986) cinema of attractions model, and Eugenie Brinkema’s (2014) work on affect, may be useful in arguing for the creative value of visual effects work.

3. The cinema industry begins to adopt vertical integration at the same time as the television industry begins to move towards “TVII” in the 1980s–1990s (Johnson, 2007).

4. Tellingly, In the blink of an eye's afterword on digital editing makes up half of the book's length.