Book overview

From Film Practice to Data Process explicitly interrogates what is happening at the frontiers of contemporary ‘digital film’ production at a key transitional moment in 2012, when both the film industry and film-production practices were situated between the two distinct medium polarities of film and digital.

Evidence of this transition can be found across a swathe of institutional sites. Industry discourse at this particular moment was rife with representations and images of the impacts of digital technologies upon film production. Chris Kenneally's documentary Side by Side, which examined Hollywood's response to the digital transition of cinematographic practice, captures the coexistence of film and data in both the title and the content. In a similar vein, Tacita Dean's FILM installation in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, which ran from October 2011 to March 2012, simultaneously expressed the threat to film in that current moment whilst also celebrating its unique aesthetic qualities. The emergence and visibility of the new labour conditions of the digital film economy were evident in a crisis in the special effects (VFX) industry as it adjusted to exponential international growth and global competition. Significant changes to the UK's film funding regime were signalled by the closure of the UK Film Council (UKFC) and the transfer of its responsibilities to the British Film Institute (BFI). Publications proliferated during this time as the academic community and the film industry responded to this period of intense change. The transitional moment is exemplified in Andrew Utterson's From IBM to MGM (2011), while the threat to industry stability is captured in the title of the USA Science and Technology Council's second ‘Digital Dilemma’ report (2012). The Hollywood Costume exhibition at London's V&A Museum in 2012 manifested what I will analyse as a temporally-specific and distinctive hybridised-aesthetic. In this case, the juxtaposition of material and digital is made manifest through augmenting the physical display of the costume by means of projected images of the performers’ heads on screens which were mounted on the shoulders of the mannequins.To frame the work of the book, I have deliberately chosen to give emphasis to the terms – ‘film’ and ‘data’ – as opposed to analogue and digital although I do still use these when referring to a ‘signal’ transmission process and medium specificity.