[Commlist] Call for abstracts: Virtual Production: What's Real?

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) Colin Perry: 
(colin.perry /at/ deakin.edu.au)
Sean Redmond: (s.redmond /at/ deakin.edu.au)
Lienors Torre: (lienors.torre /at/ deakin.edu.au)
Members of the Deakin Motion Lab, Deakin University, Australia

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