Digital Film Production Preservation and Access

This chapter examines digital film production preservation and access in the moment of the ‘Digital Dilemma’and the attendant challenges to the archiving of digital film which are summarised as reliability, vulnerability, volume and data complexity. Different archival paradigms are considered including film, born digital and hybrid, and the associated archival aesthetics, drawing from various branches of enquiry within archival studies. This includes considerations of Sally Potter’s own online, interactive archive SP-ARK – whereby all film/analogue was digitised – and the archival structure developed by the Deep Film Access Project (DFAP) – designed to accommodate both film, data and hybrid assets. The chapter contends that archival structures support and replicate auteurism leading to omissions and occlusions of both personnel and practices. Evidence is provided to demonstrate that the way in which an archive is conceived, shaped and organised captures the various ‘aesthetics of production’ and ‘Production Aesthetics’ of a moment in time, as well as its concomitant ‘production legacy aesthetics’, ‘archival legacy aesthetics’ and embedded paradoxes of representation.

Digital Film Production Time

This chapter explores the notion of digital film production ‘time’ By examining the various different temporalities of film production. Drawing primarily upon the case-study materials of Ginger & Rosa, the chapter maps the 2012 moment of transition from working with film to working with data, and the hybrid practices and protocols that manifested as a result. It examines how the introduction of new technologies and digital processes challenged the orthodoxies of long-established film industry production practice including how workflow patterns were effected with the advent of the digital in film production. The chapter includes the proposition of a ‘Creative Core’ Structure of Production model with which to understand the determinants and impacts of on-set workflow, illuminating the emergence a specific aesthetic of production which is referred to as ‘workflow-warp’ and ‘workflow-weft.’ The former refers to the temporal bending of the traditional film structure and pace out of shape, and the latter – the process of weaving together a complex blend of the film and the digital into an inextricable tapestry.

Epilogue

This chapter closes the book with a look back at 2012 through the contemporary moment of 2017 reflecting upon recent changes and innovations in the film industry. Five years on from the temporal origin of the book’s focus of study, the film industry and film production has continued to be impacted by digital interventions in innumerable ways. Since 2012, new creative and logistical responses to technological innovations have proliferated, resulting in new types of film production and new exhibition practices. This chapter summarises the key concepts of the book - Production Aesthetic; collaborative auteurism; transitional auteurship; and workflow-warp and weft. The chapter looks forwards to the future of digital film studies–approaches and methods through a summary of the analytical framework developed within the book: through the unification and cross-analyses of the tripartite of text, production aesthetics and representational text(s) and their subsequent mobilization and dissemination.

Digital Film Production Representations

This chapter explores the various modes, tools and types of film industry representation, whereby film is the conduit through which we see film production, and is subject to its own representational modes, aesthetics and practices. A genealogy of different types of mediated films and their making are presented. The chapter details how Ginger & Rosa communicated and embedded its Production Aesthetic in a number of different ways. The chapter presents the inherent paradox which is innate to these modes of representation where the film production attempts to make itself visible whilst simultaneously rendering itself invisible. This leads to a conflicting aesthetic of ‘pseudo-visibility’ and ‘hyper-invisibility’ – the simultaneous openness and foreclosure of film production practice obscuring people, histories and practices. Drawing on themes of invisible labour, invisible economies, politics of invisibility and aesthetics of erasure, the chapter then turns to considerations where aesthetics of production are made manifest in modes of resistance – where the tools, iconography and aesthetics of production are subverted for moments of protest by film industry practitioners.

Digital Film Production Space

This chapter disentangles the deeply ingrained celluloid practices of digital film production. Through the examination of embodied practices, onset processes and protocols, including considerations of filmmaking iconography in hardware design, software and interface aesthetics. The origins of the often perplexing film and celluloid skeuomorphs are also traced. The chapter considers the reasons for the persistence of these practices which conversely seek to simultaneously erase the analogue whilst at the same time mask the use of the digital medium. In its close textual examination of Digital Film Production Space, the chapter includes detailed considerations of the attendant ‘production apparatus’ of Ginger & Rosa (which is the same apparatus used by the film industry in a diversity of national contexts) and the manifestation of the film in digital and virtual representations – proposing a ‘Production Aesthetic’ which visually characterizes the making of the film. The chapter includes a consideration of ‘celluloid pedagogies’, and how the various practitioners on Ginger & Rosa learned their crafts, and how they describe them through material practices and tactile experience.

Digital Film Production People

This chapter presents a critical examination of the wider context of the film industry using Ginger & Rosa as a lens through which to examine the three main professional working frameworks that film industry professionals operate within - the network, the department and the project itself, the film. Drawing on interviews with established film professionals, the chapter examines these three distinctive, yet overlapping spheres, their intersections, their challenges and their moments of contradiction. The chapter extrapolates the organisational structure as specific to the Ginger & Rosa ‘project’ and examines in detail the structures and working relationships of three different departments–Camera/Electrical, Assistant Director (AD), Production and Post-production. These discussions draw out the complex interplay between, on the one side, a highly craft-based, traditional classical narrative film production, and, on the other, a production shaped by new digital technologies and interstitial work specific to the film-to-data moment. Through the mapping of a Personnel Structure and Working Relations model, the chapter examines how Sally Potter manages to nurture innovation and experimentalism within these seemingly inflexible structures through ‘collaborative’ and ‘transitional’ auteurism.’

Digital Film Production Studies

The chapter provides a state-of-the field picture in 2012 – a moment where industry discourse was rife with representations and images of the impacts of digital technologies upon film production. The chapter outlines the approach of the book – the undertaking of a ‘Digital Film Production Study’ – a theoretical and conceptual framework synthesizing Production Studies, Film Studies and Digital Humanities, in order to be able to grapple with this complex industry at a critical moment of transition. The chapter outlines the methodology of the book - an examination of the people and processes involved in the entire lifecycle of one film – released under the title of Ginger & Rosa (Directed by Sally Potter) in October 2012. The chapter explains how it is emblematic of the transitional film-to-data period. The chapter also provides an overview of Sally Potter’s work and her own interest in how digital innovations in filmmaking a definition of digital film. It includes a review of production studies literature and an overview of the fields methods as well as outlines of the content and arguments of the books following six chapters.