Introduction

This Chapter is concerned with the film production process and the shifting temporalities of production within the film-to-data transitional moment. Much has been written about cinematic on-screen temporalities (Mulvey, 2006; Stewart, 2007; Mroz, 2012; Corrigan 2016, Kendall, 2016), in particular, there has been a renewed interest in slow cinema within Film Studies scholarship (James 2010; Sandhu 2012; Schoonover 2012; Koepnick 2014; Tiago and Barradas 2015; Andrew 2016; Archer 2016; Beckman 2016) but in contrast, there has been limited consideration of film production time: the temporalities and speed of film production.

Film is a time-based medium in every sense of the term and in every aspect of production; it is a temporal register which can both expand and compress time. Similarly, film production is a time-based and time-bound process. As Babette Mangolte states: ‘For a filmmaker, you could say that time is of the essence and is everywhere inscribed into film in a complex and metaphorical manner. Time is appended with an adjective and to name a few, filmmakers speak of running time, screen time, performance time, shooting time, real time and a sense of time’ (2003: 262).

Time is literally imprinted on all aspects of the production process via the ubiquitous time code – the eight-digit numerical code which displays hours, minutes, seconds and frames, and is used to both identify and subsequently synchronise every single frame of film or digital film: it is ‘a unique, searchable identifier’ (Brown, 2015: 264). Both celluloid and digital film production semantics are steeped in time-based analogies and metaphors which allude to the procedural and processual, from celluloid film being processed at a laboratory and being subjected to careful timing of exposures, to the delivery of the Digital Cinema Package which can only be projected in cinemas with its accompanying time-based access key.

This Chapter's considerations of the structures, patterns and workflows of industrial, location-based digital feature-film production through the primary case study of Ginger & Rosa reveals that time shifting is manifesting in two key ways within the industrial digital film production cycle.