Animating Unpredictable Effects: Nonlinearity in Hollywood's R&D Complex

by Jordan Gowanlock

Overview

Uncanny computer-generated animations of splashing waves, billowing smoke clouds, and characters’ flowing hair have become a ubiquitous presence on screens of all types since the 1980s. This Open Access book charts the history of these digital moving images and the software tools that make them. Unpredictable Visual Effects uncovers an institutional and industrial history that saw media industries conducting more private R&D as Cold War federal funding began to wane in the late 1980s. In this context studios and media software companies took concepts used for studying and managing unpredictable systems like markets, weather, and fluids and turned them into tools for animation. Unpredictable Visual Effects theorizes how these animations are part of a paradigm of control evident across society, while at the same time exploring what they can teach us about the relationship between making and knowing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030742294
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	05/29/2021
Series:	Palgrave Animation
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jordan Gowanlock is a media historian. For the past two years he has been conducting research as a postdoctoral visiting scholar in the Department of Film and Media at UC Berkeley, USA. He is currently a non-regular faculty member at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Canada.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Defining Nonlinear Animation.- Chapter 1: Simulation and R&D: Knowing and Making.- Chapter 2: Hollywood’s R&D Complex.- Chapter 3: Engineering Moving Images: “Tech dev” meets “look dev”.- Chapter 4: Animating Management.- Chapter 5: Catastrophe, Chaos, and Perfect Storms.- Conclusion: Engineering Movies. 210.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Unpredictable Visual Effects offers important new contexts for thinking about Hollywood blockbusters. This book provides a substantial and important intervention into the fields of cinema studies, effects studies, industrial history, digital aesthetics, and media archeology. Gowanlock asserts the role of Hollywood blockbuster to shape development of computer graphic technologies and makes a very convincing argument for why nonlinear simulation, as a product of the R&D industrial complex, should be a central area of study.” (Julie Turnock, Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana)