[csaa-forum] Call for abstracts, Virtual production: What's Real?

[Sean Redmond]

Virtual Production: What’s Real?
Call for Abstracts
for a proposed edited book collection.
Deadline for abstracts: Monday 15th May 2023
Virtual Production (VP) represents one of the most significant transformations to the way screen content is written, developed and produced. Its significance to new screen-making processes is clearest in the upending of much of the work in visual effects from post-production to pre-production. These transformations flow through to how creative work is conceptualized and developed allowing for the meticulous planning of scenes to accommodate the mixture of photorealistic sets, displayed on large LED walls, with physical sets. VP reorientates the way film, television and animation artists work with their stories, offering room for exploration by way of granting them greater flexibility to visualize shots and mise-en-scene before anyone has stepped foot on set. And yet, a new type of creative and organizational discipline enters screen production, lessening the opportunity for spontaneity and happenchance.
Issues of sustainability and ethical uses of resources are of emerging concern. The computational power and resource hungriness of VP is of interest: while it lessens the need to ‘travel’ to locations, it draws on minerals that are being severely depleted. Start-ups drive its economies, as do the transnational media conglomerates who invest in its technologies. VP is driven by innovators and by the demands of entertainment capitalism.
The issues that VP gives rise to are not simply or singularly to do with transformations in production, however. VP challenges conventional notions of realism and what can be considered a pro-filmic event. Its seamless virtual reality blends with the physical environment, making it difficult to discern the differences between them. Light, colour, texture and definition are given new properties and intensities. VP dematerializes the ‘grain’ of film and yet can add any amount of weight and texture to the screen image. VP’s ‘Volume’ and 3D engines are the God Particles of screen art: they can bring into existence new worlds and new realities, extending the very borders and boundaries of what can be filmed, animated and represented.
While animation and animated visual effects have enabled such approaches for several decades, the seamless, situated and real-time processes of VP are of increasing significance. Animated actors and visual effects, alongside the gaming cultures that have newly emerged, sees animation and VP connected in new and profound ways.
The very nature of ‘on screen’ acting and performance is also transformed by VP: actors are asked to perform in Volume environments, enmeshed in the live visualisation, and yet they are also ontologically removed from ‘physical’ interactions in the tangible environment. On the one hand, actors are drawn further from a physical location into a virtual illusion. Their dress, costume and props can all be created in post-production, leaving them partly in ‘rehearsal’ mode. On the other hand, the immersive power of that illusion brings their performance closer to the environment, creating verisimilitude within the represented reality, a real time connection difficult to create in previous green screen environments. Their perception of ‘realism’ and of acting is arguably transformed by these processes.
Audiences find themselves drenched in these new VP realities: on the one hand, making the spectacular seem ordinary, and on the other, offering fully immersive and sensorial viewing encounters. VP enacts a new type of virtualised human.
In VP, questions of representation seem to be equalized, particularly in relation to race and ethnicity. Systems such as Disney Research Studios and ILM’s Medusa purports to capture ‘true skin pigmentation, colour texture maps, luminosity, and blood flow of the actor’s face’ (Anon, 2020). Virtual film production thus seems to remove light skin tone as its default setting, democratising the way different coloured bodies are captured. Nonetheless, the virtual nature of such representations may act to remove them from indexical reality/realism, so that these non-white bodies are witnessed or viewed as passing through the technology - there and not there at the same time. This hyperreal passing would undermine their significance as affective racial registers, inviting a type of ‘toxic empathy’ (Nakamura, 2019) from the viewer.
In this call for papers, we seek contributions that look at one or more of these six central aspects of VP:
1. Transformations to the way screen content is written, developed and produced.
2. The concerns of entertainment capital, the environment, and soft power.
3. Questions and issues of realism and performance.
4. Reception: viewing ‘ordinary’ and immersive worlds. The virtualisation of the viewing experience.
5. Questions and issues of representation.
6. The evolving uses, roles and perception of animation (CGI environments, animated actors and animated visual effects) in VP productions.
We take the screen to include film, television, animation, and, more broadly, its expanded dimensions found in installations, gallery films, and the new modes and modalities of exhibition. We welcome abstracts that take one or more of these forms/technologies/sites as their case study.
Indicative Topics include but are not limited to:
Perceptions of reality and realism in a VP environment
Cinematography and volumetric performance
Method and performance in VP
VP and the reshaping of the creative process
VP and environmental concerns
VP and entertainment capitalism
The ‘spectacle’ of VP: awe, wonder, plasticity
Sounding VP
The aesthetics of VP: light, colour, grain and scale
VP and representations of gender, race and ethnicity
Photogammetry and place: uncoupling time and space
Digital assets, simulacra and simulacrums
The relationship between, and the impact of, game, animation, and/or live concert industries and technologies in VP
Audience Interactivity and VP: affects and effects
Animated worlds and VP: immersion, explosion, hybridity
VP and genre: old and new forms of hybridity
Post-production and VP: computational logic and the end of ‘error’

Abstracts:
Should include title, 350 words summary, and a brief bio.
Deadline for abstracts: Monday 15th May 2023

Submitted to:
Sian Mitchell: sian.mitchell at deakin.edu.au<mailto:sian.mitchell at deakin.edu.au>
Colin Perry: colin.perry at deakin.edu.au<mailto:colin.perry at deakin.edu.au>
Sean Redmond: s.redmond at deakin.edu.au<mailto:s.redmond at deakin.edu.au>
Lienors Torre: lienors.torre at deakin.edu.au<mailto:lienors.torre at deakin.edu.au>
Members of the Deakin Motion Lab, Deakin University, Australia


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