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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Intensive Post-Production and Creative Infrastructures
Text.Serial.Journal
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Projects & Abstracts
2016-10-01
2021-09-22
2016-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Allain Daigle
2016/10/01
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
2036-461X
26-27
en
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Intensive Post-Production and Creative Infrastructures
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16453/16775
16
Intensive Post-Production and Creative Infrastructures
Allain Daigle / Ph.D. Thesis Project1
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee




   Over the last two decades, the spaces and places of cinematic pre-production,
production, and post-production have become increasingly intertwined. VFX
previsualization becomes critical for planning out the on-set cinematography of
Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013);2 Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) was shot in
6K so that Fincher had the flexibility to reframe shots after principle photo-
graphy was complete;3 George Miller sat in a Sydney theater and remotely di-
rected colorist Eric Whipp, who graded Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller,
2015) in a Toronto post-production facility.4 The boundaries that mark where
and when the moving image is ‘produced’ are increasingly blurred, which also
blurs the creative responsibilities of roles like that of the director, producer, ci-
nematographer, editor, colorist, and visual effects artist.
   One of the primary reasons for this spatial ambiguity is an expansion and
intensification of post-production practices. Prior to the 1990s, cinematic post-
production primarily included film processing, linear editing, and sound editing.
However, as noted by Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film
Editing and Arundale & Trieu’s Modern Post: Workflows and Techniques for
Digital Filmmakers,5 the widespread adoption of computer platforms for film
editing throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s enabled a significant expansion
of the techniques that were financially and creatively viable ‘in post’. In addition
to linear and sound editing, post began to function as a more complex ecology



1
  Ph.D. thesis supervised by Dr. Tami Williams. For information: amdaigle@uwm.edu
2
  David S. Cohen, ‘Cutting Production Costs With Cheaper Previs?’, Variety, (29 August 2014),
<http://variety.com/2014/artisans/production/cutting-production-costs-via-previs-1201292223/>
[accessed 2 March 2016].
3
  Jonny Elwyn, ‘The Making of Gone Girl: Inside the Gone Girl Post-Production Workflow’,
<http://jonnyelwyn.co.uk/film-and-video-editing/the-making-of-gone-girl/> [accessed 2 March
2016].
4
  ‘Meet The Colourist: Eric Whipp’, <http://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/customers/meet-the-colourist/
eric_whipp.php> [accessed 2 March 2016].
5
  Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Los Angeles: Silman-James
Press, 2001); Scott Arundale and Tashi Trieu, Modern Post: Workflows and Techniques for Digital
Filmmakers (New York: Focal Press, 2015).

                                       Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVI, no. 26-27, Spring/Summer 2016
                                         Allain Daigle


of color grading, visual effects, image compositing, asset management, and
mastering & delivery.
   What’s significant in this shift is not the presence of these practices alone.
What is significant is that intensive post has become an increasingly normative
work practice. While intense post-production is historically associated with the
contemporary blockbuster or special-effects intensive genres like science fiction
or action films, intensive post is a refinement process that increasingly sustains
multiple genres and production scales. These post-production practices and the
ways they support cinematic storytelling are not inherent to the medium of the
computer, nor have they occurred as a neutral product of technological ‘progress’.
Rather, what we understand as contemporary post-production emerges through
a messy (and ongoing) period of infrastructural development. Creative weight
is displaced from medium specific roles onto a more distributed framework of
creative collaboration. At best, these workflows integrate the potential for ex-
pression in a collaborative human environment; at worst, workflows subordinate
creative expression to managerial interests in efficiency and distribution.
   Conceptions of creative space have been central, I argue, to the ways in which
creative management have sought to secure the consent and creative energies of
editors, directors, and audiovisual artists in the ambiguously successful project
of coordinating cinema’s digitization. As film became file, producers and studios
drew upon spatial conceptions of editing and post-production in an attempt to
organize the shifting temporality of the when and where of digital cinema pro-
duction. Intensive post practices have been accompanied by, and indeed insti-
tuted by, spatial logic that attempted to manage and locate creative control in
an expanding creative field that challenged extant hierarchies of creative con-
trol. The expanding creative practices of post-production have been rationalized
through spatial logic aimed at 1) mapping out creative spaces and 2) making
these creative spaces ‘flow’. While these economic rationales of space do not de-
termine the kinds of work artists will or can produce, they do incentivize certain
kinds of creative labor and make other kinds more difficult.6
   This project will investigate a set of questions concerning digitization, creative
space, and the state of infrastructure in commercial creative practice. I am still
early in my research process and am hesitant to offer up the specific body of films
or particular subset of practices upon which this project will move. My intention,
though, is to make a contribution towards understanding how contemporary
post-production apparatuses coordinate with what Nadia Bozak has called ‘the
ecological image economy’.7 If post is the conceptual infrastructure by which

6
  This project intends to perform the kind of infrastructural inquiry modeled in: Geoffrey C.
Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1999); Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth
Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015).
7
  Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2012), p. 192.

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                 Intensive Post-Production and Creative Infrastructures


studios refine an aesthetically seamless cinema, it may also be the space in which
we reclaim a space for sustainable and ‘imperfect’ creative labor.
   In examining the spaces of contemporary post-production practices, I seek
to understand the political conditions for creativity that have been shaped by
economically-minded imaginations of creative space during a period of intensi-
fied practice expansion. The goal in this project, then, is to both to trace an area
of cinema production that often renders itself into invisibility, consider the long-
term effects of these changes in practice, and make a contribution to understan-
ding what kind of creative infrastructure these protocols sustain for the horizon
of creative labor in cinema production.




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