Engineering Moving Images: “Tech Dev” Meets “Look Dev”
AbstractThis chapter investigates the way engineering principles have transformed cinematic visual effects and animation production since the 1980s, noting the growing influence of “agile” software development. Film industry training manuals, trade press articles, and interviews with workers show that the flexible, reprogrammable nature of production “workflows” requires constant work to maintain the technical connective tissue of “pipelines.” This emphasis on making and re-making custom tools for every production serves post-Fordist demands of flexibility. Automated simulation-based forms of animation offer a paradigmatic case for these trends, where a spectrum of technical work spans basic research done by lead scientists, through to the scripts written and plug-ins installed by simulation artists.
