The Screens of Virtual Production: What is Real? Sian Mitchell 9781032730721

This book is the first dedicated edited collection that explores the virtualisation of screen-making processes from pre-production to post-production, while attuning to the aesthetic, ideological and performative contexts upended by these integrated technologies. This book explores what is real in virtual production, as a provocative one, implicitly drawing on the philosophies of the moving image and the recent work on new forms of post-human perceptual realism.

This edited collection is divided into the following four themed sections. Section One, It's Always Been Real: Contemporising Virtual Production, addresses the histories of film realism in relationship to visual technologies, providing both a theoretical and philosophical 'anchor' point for the collection, and a necessary genealogy. Section Two, The Body Becomes You: Performing Virtual Production, examines the transformation that occurs in immersive virtual worlds, while also exploring how the body is itself virtualised. Section Three, Skin Deep: Gazing with Virtual Production, addresses the way race, ethnicity, gender and environment are supposedly equalised, and yet are still found to reproduce the colonised looking regimes of western, mainstream screen culture. Section Four, Whose Work? Labouring with Virtual Production, draws together writing that examines the way production processes have been transformed, affecting not only work patterns but also the way aesthetics, form and function, operate.

This book encompasses many production themes and will appeal to media students and professionals interested in the production of film.

Sean Redmond is Professor of Cinema at RMIT University, Australia.

Colin Perry is a Film and Television lecturer at Deakin University. His background as a director, editor, sound engineer and academic all contribute to the breadth of knowledge he brings to this subject.

Sian Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Animation at Deakin University, Australia. She is also the Festival Director and co-founder of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival.

Lienors Torre is a Senior Lecturer in Animation at Deakin University.

"The Screens of Virtual Production is the most comprehensive and authoritative work I've read on precisely what happened with the advent of digital virtual technologies of production and consumption. While the collection is an astute and imaginative engagement with film history, theory, and philosophy, what also sets the volume apart is its engagement with the nuances of how virtual images and screens work in their myriad forms. The book demonstrates that virtuality was and is not only a technology, but a way of making meaning and power. This is a major work in the field."

-Associate Professor Bruce Isaacs, Chair of Film Studies, School of Arts, Communication, and English (SACE), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney

"The Screens of Virtual Production is a thought-provoking exploration of how virtual production is revolutionizing the art of filmmaking. This collection offers bold, incisive insights into the intersections of technology, performance, representation, and labor. It's more than just timely-it's a vital, overdue contribution that redefines how we understand the future of screen media. A must-read for scholars, creators, and anyone eager to grasp the profound ways virtual production is reshaping reality itself."

-Professor Angela Ndalianis, Professor Emeritus, Centre for Transformative Media Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology