Animating Management

This chapter studies how the management theory of digital animation studios like Pixar Animation has been influenced by the paradigms that premise their unpredictable algorithmic animations. This epistemic frame leads Pixar to represent creativity as the unpredictable product of carefully controlled conditions and parameters. This collapse of technology, animation, and management science helps to sculpt Pixar’s own corporate image as both an animation studio and a technology company. These findings nuance existing accounts of post-Fordist labor in creative industries.

Simulation and R&D: Knowing and Making

This chapter of Animating Unpredictable Effects charts the development of the software tools used to create uncanny simulation-based digital animations, drawing a genealogy that starts with nineteenth century mathematics, which were transformed into management and prediction tools by private and military R&D between the 1940s and 1980s. Through this, the chapter identifies a connection between these animation tools and simulation tools used in fields as diverse as meteorology, nuclear physics, and aeronautics that create unpredictability through stochastic or dynamic simulation. Using this information, the chapter offers a theoretical framework for understanding how fictional simulations in animation and visual effects make meaning through “knowing how” as opposed to cinema’s tradition approach of “knowing that,” leveraging concepts from the history of science.

Cinematic Chaos, Catastrophe, and Unpredictable Embrace

This chapter studies how unpredictable change is understood through concepts like of fractals, chaos theory, catastrophe theory, perfect storms, and climate models in feature films from 1982 to 2019, both as narrative themes and as spectacular simulation-based animations. Positing a particular mode of visual effects spectatorship, the chapter observes how narrative, theme, and spectacular images represent these concepts in congress. Over the period surveyed, these representations shift from sublime overwhelming images of disastrous events to more recent examples that embrace chaos as a source of creativity and knowledge.

Engineering Moving Images: “Tech Dev” Meets “Look Dev”

This 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.

Conclusion: Engineering Movies

The conclusion to Animating Unpredictable Effects argues for the importance of understanding engineering and R&D as a part of animation and visual effects production, in opposition to critics who dismiss these as mere tools for hyperrealism. This provides for a better understanding of a diverse range of contemporary digital media production practices that involve extensive technical work, but it also sheds light on film production practices going back a century. Using the example of practical special effects, like puffs of smoke or splashing waves in a studio water tank, which create unpredictable motion under artificial conditions, the conclusion draws a long history of practices that represent the world by making artificial mechanisms rather than capturing or drawing images.

Hollywood’s R&D Complex

This chapter of Animating Unpredictable Effects studies how Hollywood became a producer of software and sponsor of R&D. Using archival research of publications and conference records, it charts the computer graphics research group ACM SIGGRAPH’s origins in the military-industrial-academic complex and notes the rise of a new research complex driven by media industries, with the Hollywood blockbuster playing a key role in driving investment. This chapter also studies how the economics of film industries were transformed by R&D using SEC financial filings from studios. This investigation of the economics of R&D helps explain the economic instability of the VFX industry, which has been a key topic of discussion since the closure of Rhythm and Hues and the rise of VFX worker movements.

Introduction: “Fully Nonlinear”

The introduction to Animating Unpredictable Effects establishes a specific category of digital animation that is based on making unpredictable simulations. The book situates this form of animation in the context of key discussions about the relationship between animation and automation, and about the agency digital animators have when working with increasingly opaque software tools. The introduction further situates this type of animation in the history of cinema, which has long been preoccupied with natural motion and topics of contingency.