Networks in the shadow of markets and hierarchies : calling the shots in the visual effects industry

The nature and organisation of creative industries and creative work has increasingly been at the centre of academic and policy debates in recent years. The differentiation of this field, economically and spatially, has been tied to more general arguments about the trend towards new trust-based, network forms of organization and economic coordination. In the first part of this paper, we set out, unpack and then critique the conceptual and empirical foundations of such claims. In the main section of the paper, we draw on research into a particular creative sector of the economy - the visual effects component of the film industry - a relatively new though increasingly important global production network. By focusing both on firms and their workers, and drawing on concepts derived from global value chain, labour process and institutional analysis, we aim to offer a more realistic and grounded analysis of creative work within creative industries. The analysis begins with an attempt to explain the power dynamics and patterns of competition and collaboration in inter-firm relations within the Hollywood studio-dominated value chain, before moving to a detailed examination of how the organisation of work and reemployment relations are central to the capturing of value. On the basis of that evidence, we conclude that trust-based networks and collaborative communities play some part in accessing and acquiring leverage in the value chain, but do not explain the core mechanisms of resource allocation, coordination and work organisation

Animating Unpredictable Effects

Uncanny computer-generated animations of splashing waves, billowing smoke clouds, and characters’ flowing hair have become a ubiquitous presence on screens of all types since the 1980s. This Open Access book charts the history of these digital moving images and the software tools that make them. Unpredictable Visual Effects uncovers an institutional and industrial history that saw media industries conducting more private R&D as Cold War federal funding began to wane in the late 1980s. In this context studios and media software companies took concepts used for studying and managing unpredictable systems like markets, weather, and fluids and turned them into tools for animation. Unpredictable Visual Effects theorizes how these animations are part of a paradigm of control evident across society, while at the same time exploring what they can teach us about the relationship between making and knowing

Fleeting Film: Using Story to Seek Archival Permanence in the Transitory and Globalized Digital Visual Effects Industry

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. Archiving is a long-standing vocation, founded on principles such as provenance, original order, truth, evidence, preservation and permanence. A far cry from the visual spectacle and movable feast of film visual effects (VFX) - a transitory and globalized industry of disposable firms, ever-advancing technologies and a roving workforce which craft digital animations and seamless effects for the big screen. In this paper we utilize the concept of "story" as a premise to bring together the seemingly different vocations of archival science and film VFX. Through an exploration of digital film production and archival practice under the context of storytelling, we aim to highlight the need for archivists to work with the VFX industry to ensure evidence of this culturally significant aspect of filmmaking and cinema discourse is preserved into the future. As well present the argument that archives are more than collections of historical evidence. Archives are story - and archivists are storytellers

Applying the successful factors of Korean Wave for the development of film industry : the case study of Vietnam

Over the past 30 years, the rapid and consistent development of South Korean culture can be witnessed globally. This phenomenon has been generalized and commonly known as “Korean wave”. Questioning this phenomenon, a proposition has been made, on the grounds that this success comes from the positive influences of South Korea’s macro environmental forces including the government, business, policies and social. This dissertation aims to study Korean wave and especially the Korean film industry, to localize the most notable factors of Korean film industry into the film industry of another country; more specifically, the film industry in Vietnam. Interview methodology will be applied to get qualitative data from these samples. These data will also be combined with the refinement of secondary researches regarding Korean film industry. The interviewees are divided into different stakeholders who involved in the development of the film industry. Samples including producers, film directors, distributors, celebrities, politicians are carefully selected to provide a comprehensive picture of the industry. From the analysis of the literature and interviews of stakeholders, propositions are made to improve the Vietnamese film industry. The most important improvement, according to interviewees and as identified from the literature, is the introduction of protectionist measures for domestic films and other supporting policies for production companies in the form of training courses or equipment, stricter regulations against piracy, along with relaxing the laws on censorship. Within the industry, more vertical integration is encouraged to improve efficiency across the value chain, from the production to distribution and exhibition of films, as well as the export of Vietnamese works to foreign markets. Overall, learning from the Korean model, the mindset towards the Vietnamese film industry should be that of a competitive industry working in synergy with other creative industries, promoting the Vietnamese national identity while maintaining profitability and fair competition

Simulation FX: Cinema and the R&D Complex

This study looks at the ongoing development of tools and practices used to animate nonlinear physical phenomena, such as the crash of ocean waves or the movement of human hair, in the visual effect and animation industries. These tools and practices are developed in a nexus between public funding, research universities, the film industry, and various other sectors, such as aerospace and meteorology. This study investigates how technological development became integrated with film production, and in turn how epistemic paradigms were shared between the film industry, scientific research institutions and other industries. At the heart of these animation tools and practices, and the networks of institutions that developed them, is a way of thinking that seeks to make use of unpredictable nonlinear complexity by shaping it toward specific applications. I observe this in the way animation and visual effect studios seek the realistic appearance of nonlinear natural movement through simulation, while also implementing technologies and practices to direct the look of these simulations. I also observe this in a variety of related examples, from the way the concept of research and development unites science and application, to the way management science promotes hands off approaches that preserve the unpredictable nature of creative work. My methods consist of charting the circulation of ideas, technologies, moving images and people through contact zones such as the computer science special interest group ACM SIGGRAPH, using archival research of trade communications, scholarly publications and conference proceedings, as well as interviews with industry workers

Reborn of the Beauty

Nowadays, 3D techniques play an important role in the reproduction of history and culture on screen. Modeling and 3D visual effects, using technical tools and other computer methods to achieve high returns from the movie industry, have become prominent in today’s technological trends. Taiwan has always been identified as a province of China. The island nation, however, has its own unique culture and history. With the growing number of people emigrating to Taiwan annually, the opportunity to share our story has grown as well. In this regard, the 3D technique offers useful ways to bring the past back to life, discover the identity of a place, and tell a country’s unique story. This thesis project is a 240-second film created by using the 3D application Autodesk Maya and the visual application Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects. The film shows the real beauty of Taiwan and its unique architecture

A metadata-enhanced framework for high performance visual effects

This thesis is devoted to reducing the interactive latency of image processing computations in visual effects. Film and television graphic artists depend upon low-latency feedback to receive a visual response to changes in effect parameters. We tackle latency with a domain-specific optimising compiler which leverages high-level program metadata to guide key computational and memory hierarchy optimisations. This metadata encodes static and dynamic information about data dependence and patterns of memory access in the algorithms constituting a visual effect – features that are typically difficult to extract through program analysis – and presents it to the compiler in an explicit form. By using domain-specific information as a substitute for program analysis, our compiler is able to target a set of complex source-level optimisations that a vendor compiler does not attempt, before passing the optimised source to the vendor compiler for lower-level optimisation. Three key metadata-supported optimisations are presented. The first is an adaptation of space and schedule optimisation – based upon well-known compositions of the loop fusion and array contraction transformations – to the dynamic working sets and schedules of a runtimeparameterised visual effect. This adaptation sidesteps the costly solution of runtime code generation by specialising static parameters in an offline process and exploiting dynamic metadata to adapt the schedule and contracted working sets at runtime to user-tunable parameters. The second optimisation comprises a set of transformations to generate SIMD ISA-augmented source code. Our approach differs from autovectorisation by using static metadata to identify parallelism, in place of data dependence analysis, and runtime metadata to tune the data layout to user-tunable parameters for optimal aligned memory access. The third optimisation comprises a related set of transformations to generate code for SIMT architectures, such as GPUs. Static dependence metadata is exploited to guide large-scale parallelisation for tens of thousands of in-flight threads. Optimal use of the alignment-sensitive, explicitly managed memory hierarchy is achieved by identifying inter-thread and intra-core data sharing opportunities in memory access metadata. A detailed performance analysis of these optimisations is presented for two industrially developed visual effects. In our evaluation we demonstrate up to 8.1x speed-ups on Intel and AMD multicore CPUs and up to 6.6x speed-ups on NVIDIA GPUs over our best hand-written implementations of these two effects. Programmability is enhanced by automating the generation of SIMD and SIMT implementations from a single programmer-managed scalar representation

VFX – A New Frontier: The Impact of Innovative Technology on Visual Effects

Although Visual Effects (VFX) are an increasingly important element of the media content demanded by audiences, of media production (filmmaking and storytelling) and of the media industries, VFX remains a relatively under-research area within academic media or film studies. Innovations in technology are instrumental to the continuous developments in VFX technology, enabling the evolution of storytelling techniques and expanding the boundaries of VFX content and the VFX industries. In particular, a new wave of cutting-edge technologies have contributed to a period of extensive technical and organisational changes in the VFX industry. The implementation of these technologies is occurring during a period of growth in demand for VFX content, ever hight standards of quality (in particular the realism of VFX effects) and resulting demand for VFX workers. Supplying this demand for both greater quantity and quality of VFX content has increased the pressure for VFX production to be as efficient as possible. This has brought pressure on production budgets (to produce more and better content from the same or even diminishing resources) and production timeframes (“turnaround times”). One result of all these changes is that VFX workers now confront a multitude of new challenges. This study investigates the new technology which is driving or enabling these changes and in particular focuses on the impact of implementing these technologies on VFX production (the VFX workflow). The study collects evidence to show how these new technologies, combined with the broader changes in the industry, are impacting VFX production and labour. The thesis approaches this research task by use economic and sociological theories of technology, innovation, and production/labour to provide a conceptual framework to use in understanding how these changes are impacting the products produced by the industry and the work experience of VFX professionals. The next step is to fill in the gaps in knowledge resulting from the relatively under-researched nature of VFX production withing academic media and film studies. The thesis provides a detailed account of the emergence and growth of “the VFX industry”, including historical and current product and process innovations. Rather than defining the object of study in relation to content genres or types of business, the study defines the industry in terms of workers using a common set of tools. This section of the thesis explores the economic and cultural causes of changes in the industry and maps out the qualitative changes in the creativity, job satisfaction and job security/precarity of VFX labour. The collection of primary data through interviews with industry professionals provides the unique contribution of this study, setting out how VFX work is changing in different content genres, types of business and production roles, at different hierarchical levels. This study contributes to the field by addressing the need for academic and empirical research in this neglected area of study. The thesis contributes original knowledge on the impact of current technological innovations by providing research based on primary data collected from interviews with the VFX workers impacted by the implementation of the technologies. Potential policy and practical applications of this research include assisting industry professionals in deconstructing the marketing “hype” around these cutting-edge technologies and outlining uncertainties and implications of these technologies, helping them in the complex decision making of evaluating and implementing current innovative technology

Buffalo Niagara\u27s Strategic Plan for Prosperity

The Buffalo Billion Phase II plan looks back at the extraordinary strides Buffalo Niagara has made since 2011. It describes the progress and impacts of Buffalo Billion Phase I investments; and using economic indicators, points to areas where we’ve seen progress and where there are still opportunities for growth. It gives a compelling account of why we need to continue to invest in the economic enablers and core sector strategies that we as a community developed. And, based on this momentum and additional areas of opportunity presents a concrete plan for millions in additional public investment to leverage the private sector and continue to grow Buffalo Niagara’s economy

Pausing dramatic tension within contemporary action cinema: the relationship between time slicing/slow motion and suspenseful situations in action feature films through praxis lead research

Thesis (M.A. (Digital Animation))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2016Time slicing is a film-based visual effect that refers to an enhanced simulation of time at variable speeds by creating the illusion of frozen or slowly progressing motion in time; it is most commonly digitally manipulated. This report will research and analyse how it can be utilized to amplify dramatic tension, or suspenseful situations in contemporary action films through theories, technology and various filming techniques. The theoretical methodology in this report is a historical account of the technology and process in the evolution of time manipulation within photography and film leading up to time slicing. Some Film theory is included in this report in a more conceptual manner as to why time slicing or slow motion is used in suspenseful situations, particularly in the action film genre. The report also demonstrates how the high standards of time slicing in feature films can be similarly achieved on a budget which will be demonstrated through a practical component that will compare a real time versus a time sliced scenario. While it would be preferable to use a full 360-degree array of cameras, the technology involved in time slicing has not yet reached a point where it is economically accessible to a student film maker and most local industries, which is why the focus of the research paper analyses a shorter array of cameras that is just enough to capture a time slice effect. The results will then be assessed based on dramatic tension/suspense to see if they equate to the theories of montage and mise en scène discussed in the research report. As a case study, the report will then compare a scene from The Matrix to that of a scene produced as part of the practical component in order to draw conclusions on quality and the possibilities of a lower budget set-up.MT201