Any fictional representation of virtuality in a movie is the product of a complex process of design and production. Understanding some of the particularities of this process is important in order to understand these fictional representations. The following notes are based on my own work process in the productions I have been involved with, and interviews with professional movie makers made by both others and myself.
Fundamental insights into design work inform the following discussion. Design is an elusive concept and there are numerous definitions that more or less overlap, but a common denominator among many definitions is the intentional adaptation of resources to reach a predetermined goal (Buchanan, 1989; Mitchell, 1996; Rosell, 1990; Winograd, 1996). A design process starts with an idea or a demand, and ends with a finalized artifact. A designer needs to envision the future, and give it form (Lundequist, 1998). Design work explores a mental space of possibilities, and finally selects a final solution by making numerous decisions. Some design work ends with plans for construction, as in architecture and industrial design, while in, for
example, game design and movie making, there are design issues to be solved all the way into production; in movie making, design merges with craftsmanship (Bjurbom, 2005; Caldwell, 2008; Fauer, 2006).
Working as a computer graphic artist
Above-the-line movie makers such as the director, production designer and
cinematographer have the most impact on how virtuality is represented in a movie. However, post-production crewmembers finalize the visions of the three above- the-line professionals, and computer graphic (CG) artists play a vital role in
producing many of the movies that I have analyzed (for a brief introduction to the different computer graphics work in a movie production, see appendix 01).
A computer graphic artist creates computer graphics. Very often, the work is a flexible and complex combination of photography, digital painting and 3d
modeling. The skills that are needed have a firm foundation in fine art such as painting and photography. The emphasis on artist is important; even though technical skills and problem solving are important, computer graphic artists consider themselves primarily to be artists. The work they do is artistic, albeit not always art. Rather, a computer graphic artist usually works with products that can be categorized as illustrations, visualizations, or entertainment such as games or movies. As a computer graphic artist, you often have a quite personal relation to the work you do. Movie makers, in general, and computer graphic artists,
specifically, have a creative drive that is not connected to the audience, but to themselves. They rationalize their design decisions according to the idea of an audience, but it is not the audience that provides the drive. The creative drive, and one possible reason why some media workers work long hours under high
pressure, is that they want to do the best work they can. They constantly compete with themselves and others. This makes it personal, and emotional. The creative drive is both intrinsic and extrinsic. Instead of having the mindset that I do what the
audience like so that they like my stuff, it is more a matter of the mindset that I have to show the audience how wonderful my inner vision for this is.
Two additional, quite personal creative drives are worth mentioning. The first is best described as a curiosity, a longing to see how the imagery actually turns out. When working as a computer graphic artist you often have a strong vision of how the final result will be, and there is much challenge and excitement in discovering how it will actually turn out. It almost feels like the faint memory of a dream, but with the twist that this image becomes more and more clear when time passes, rather than gradually fading into oblivion. This can be theorized as a tension between an internalized and an externalized vision. The more I work on an image, the more it becomes an external object that I can step back from and watch, almost as if someone else has done it. The second drive is what I call the smell of the kill. This is a drive that is more primordial, a hunter-gatherer instinct, an urge to
finalize, to reach a goal. I would compare this feeling to the challenge of collecting yet another stamp in your stamp collection, of making a good deal in a purchase, or running the final hundred meter dash in a long distance race.
Pragmatic creativity
My study of my own media productions suggests that very little time and effort is spent on creative decisions. Instead, the design decisions are often pragmatic. The following logbook excerpts from one of my productions give an illustration of the
situation.38
Managed to find an hour to model on the microscope; didn’t get very far; much to model. Many meetings, no time to work.
Desperately seeking the two or three hours I need to complete the GUI.
Not only is time in short supply, but a common observation is that the time and focus spent on creative and design oriented issues is a fraction of the total project work. In the Environmental Science Investigation project, much of the time was spent on talking about other issues such as production procedures or project management. Most design decisions were done without any deeper discussions. In both the Rymdlust and the Solen, månen och den röda planeten productions, most of the time was spent on just finalizing the computer graphics, not considering the look of them. One exception was the Via Tecta project together with Jonathan Westin. During this project, we talked for hours and wrote numerous e-mails about different aspects of the design of the visualization. Both Jonathan and I are computer graphic artists and, as such, we clearly took both pride and interest in working hard on the creative issues.
As a computer graphic artist you go into a production with a high level of
creative ambition, but then the work often becomes a constant struggle to keep on striving for the ideal imagery despite the difficulties. There are indications that these pressing working conditions are the norm in high profile, professional visual
effects work as well. During 2012, there was a recurrent debate within the American visual effects industry about the poor working conditions, with short- term employments, low salaries, unfavorable insurance policies, and general time pressure to produce more in less time. In my interview with Bob Saul, a computer graphic artist at NASA, he describes his own experience of working on a high
profile Hollywood based feature film production.39
I have done a little bit of animation for Deep Impact, and that was the hardest most frustrating thing I have ever worked on, because initially they came in and said we want you to do this little scene, it’s going to be used here, and I was intrigued and excited. From the start to the time when I finished, I worked 20 hours a day, and some days 2-3 days in a row, because it kept going back and forth in so many iterations. Change after change after change. On the last version I worked Thursday, Friday, Sunday, no sleep, no food.
Under circumstances like these, design decisions can become pragmatic and intuitive instead of rational and thought-through. Any analysis of sign-making in movie production needs to take this pragmatism in to account. We must restrain ourselves from inferring meaning where it might not exist.
Serendipity in movie production
Serendipity is when a solution to a problem appears by chance. Serendipity plays an important role in design processes. Movie makers frequently mention it in
interviews and behind-the-scenes material (Clarke, 1972; Fauer, 2006; Giger, 1979; Murch, 2001), and I have often described it myself in my autoethnographic
observations. Designers often confess to the suggestion that limitations bring about creative solutions (Neumann, 1999). Ridley Scott illustrates this in an interview when he claims that the influential production design of Blade Runner (a retrofitted futuristic city drenched in rain, darkness and smoke) came from budget limitations that forced the crew to reuse old sets and to hide the less then perfect set dressing from too close scrutiny. He ends with the comment that “by a necessity we actually started designing it that way” (Lauzirika, 2007, at 02:22).
The process of accepting limitations and surprises, and turning them into a means of coming up with creative ideas and design solutions pervades these kinds of accounts. The need to work with and around restrictions is closely related to the resources and budget of each production. In a production with extensive resources, it is usually possible to confront limitations directly. If the weather is wrong one day, then there are resources to just wait until the weather changes, or to adjust the weather, either with extensive special effects (such as rain and wind machines) or with post-production visual effects. Large-scale productions with huge resources abound with accounts of how the movie makers exert an arrogant control over every nuance of the final shot.
The importance for a poetics of virtuality is that the construction of any sign in a complex movie production is a messy process governed both by intentional
planning from the storytellers as well as external limitations turned into creative
solutions. Therefore, it is necessary to read these narratives not as perfect
executions of the author’s intent, but as a highly complex negotiation between the storyteller’s intent, the production circumstances, and the reader’s interpretations. Shaman or auteur – freedoms and limitations in design processes This poetics of virtuality concerns how virtuality is portrayed in fictional, narrative texts. Contrary to virtualities that have actually been built in real-life, fictional virtualities are essentially unconstrained by technical limitations. The storyteller is seemingly free to depict any kind of imaginable technology. These fictional
virtualities are, however, constrained by other limitations related to production methods and production cultures. When working with fiction, the storyteller is influenced by the context of production culture.
As in other design work, movie makers reference each other extensively. Even though the movie industry tries to convey a sense of secrecy towards the audience and journalists, the exchange of ideas inside the industry is quite free. According to Caldwell, there is a continuous flow of ideas in Hollywood, a continuous pitch of ideas; “It is like free water” (Caldwell, 2009b). Design in movie making is a
balancing act between staying within the boundaries of the familiar in order to not estrange the audience, while being innovative in order to achieve attention and acclaim. This is especially important in storytelling and movie making, where there is a constant demand for new stories and new worlds (Bjurbom, 2005; Buchanan, 1989; Neumann, 1999). However, these new ideas must be grounded in the known, as “the unfamiliar is always extrapolated from the known” (Gombrich, 2002, p.72).
Creative leadership in movie productions is often described as highly hierarchical, related to the idea of the director as an auteur. The creative and aesthetic decisions are lead by the movie director, with the help of primarily the cinematographer and the production designer (Fauer, 2006; LoBrutto, 1992; Tarkovsky, 1986). An important aspect of the director’s and the production designer’s work is to guide the other professionals into a team working towards a common design goal and a shared aesthetics. The production designer and
cinematographer collaborate quite intimately on the look of the movie, since the cinematographer is essentially responsible for making the props, sets, wardrobes and locations of the movie visible; the cinematographer controls the light that brings the world of the movie into being (Fauer, 2006; LoBrutto, 1992). In addition to the above mentioned professionals, a movie production can involve hundreds of workers, often divided into above-the-line (people responsible for high-level
creative decisions) and below-the-line (people who primarily execute the creative decisions, applying different crafts) (Caldwell, 2008; Caldwell, 2009).
Roland Barthes (1977) metaphorically compares the author to a shaman, meaning that authors reuse utterances of previous authors. This aligns well with movie professionals’ own comments about their work. Production designer Ted Haworth says, “if I have any style, it’s not mine, it’s borrowed” (LoBrutto, 1992, p.31), and cinematographer Hiro Narita says “when you have an idea, it is usually an idea you have seen it, you have heard or you have experienced it” (Fauer, 2006, at 30:00). The myth of the auteur, the individual, dictatorial genius, strongly
contradicts Barthes’ idea of the author as shaman.40 The collaborative approach of different directors actually covers a broad range, from directors who are very decisive about what they want and often do much on their own, to directors who listen extensively to their creative team, or not even know what they want (Keegan, 2009; Landon, 1992; LoBrutto, 1992; Neumann, 1999; Tarkovsky, 1986).
Essentially all movie making is a collaborative art (Caldwell, 2008; Handyside, 2004; Lacey, 2000; Neumann, 1999; Sundstedt, 1999), where cohesive unity is important. Andrei Tarkovsky (1986) acknowledges that cinema is a composite art, but he then singles out the director and writes that in the center of the creative work done by artists and craftspeople “stands only one person: the director, and he alone, as the last filter in the creative process of film-making” (p.18). But Tarkovsky also
emphasis the importance of the artists and craftsmen to work as a single unit; “because until we are linked up, as it were, by our very veins and nerves, until our blood starts to circulate around the same system, it is simply not possible to make a real film” (p.136). In America, the auteur myth appears in the early 1970s when a number of directors managed to establish themselves as “distinctive artistic personas” (Thompson, 1999, p.2), more or less importing the idea from Europe where it was already popularized (Handyside, 2004). The French auteur concept originated in a 1954 essay Une certaine tendance du cinéma français (A certain tendency in French cinema) by François Truffaut, and was theorized in 1968 by Andrew Sarris in his book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968. The
auteur concept implies that a movie should be a personal statement and that a good film cannot be made by committee (Bordwell, 1985). The assumption that
American cinema is a commercial, mindless industry while European cinema is a playground for geniuses was a very successful marketing strategy for the European industry, and it still works (Bordwell, 1985; Caldwell, 2008; Handyside, 2004; Thompson, 1999). Setting such marketing stunts aside, movie making is a balance act, a balance between ideas on creative leadership, between the auteur director and the committee making decisions. The following quote from Giger’s (1979) diary notes about his work on Alien succinctly illustrates the dictatorial relentlessness that appears to lie behind the auteur myth.
Scott thinks it’s absolutely great. O’Bannon, who has just flown over from the USA, doesn’t think it’s technical enough. A battle of pros and cons begins. I keep quiet; I know that Scott will win the argument.
This should be compared with Scott’s own comment in an interview concerning the work on Blade Runner (Lauzirika, 2007, at 10:09).
I don’t like discussions, I know exactly what I want, I’m gonna walk in and say it; that’s a director’s job, directors are not meant to stand there and consult with half a dozen people in the room, the term director means direct me, do the job.
40 Flueckiger (2008) suggests that there is a parallel “personality cult” (p.45) in academic discourse
concerning the visual effects industry and computer graphics, emphasizing visual effect artists such as Dennis Muren.
Whether the director acts as a dictatorial auteur or not varies between productions and depends on individual preferences. TV series production, in particular, is highly based on design-by-committee (Caldwell, 2008).
“Hollywood” – breaking down the monolith
Many of the movies I have analyzed are well-known parts of popular culture, and it would be easy to characterize them as “Hollywood” movies. What do we mean when we speak about Hollywood? It is important to realize that the concept of Hollywood is more or less illusionary. Hollywood conveys the image of itself as one entity, but Hollywood is not a stand-alone ziggurat or monolith; rather, the production culture in Los Angeles is highly interconnected with other production hubs such as Canada, London, Paris, Sydney and New Zealand (Caldwell, 2008; Caldwell, 2009). Industry people move between these locations; they meet each other. They are connected with lower profile media industries such as the ones in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and further on. At least one of my field studies gave direct access to the production culture in Los Angeles – the short film project Postcards from the future. This is important because it bridges the two parts of my study: the study of my own work and the study of narratives produced by
professional storytellers. Even though these are very different in many aspects, they still share fundamental aspects when it comes to design processes, and sign
production.
Have I accessed the production culture of Hollywood, sitting in my studio in Göteborg, Sweden? After all, Ortner (2009), another academic studying production culture, has clearly stated the importance of being on location. However,
Hollywood is not an isolated community; it is diluted with other production cultures, dispersed geographically as well as across different levels of
professionalism. Visual effects artists with work experience from high-end
productions occasionally collaborate with semi-professionals such as myself. The differences in scale and commercialism are huge, all the way from privately funded, zero-budget short films, through the independent feature films that are exhibited at art-house cinemas, up to industrialized, high concept movie franchises. Within this spectrum there is room for both highly experimental, individual work of art as well as highly formalized box-office successes, and a wide range of hybrids between these extremes (Buckland, 2006; Caldwell, 2008; Thompson, 1999). My poetics of virtuality stretches across this range. So even if my level of access has been