The Screens of Virtual Production: What is Real?

by Sian Mitchell (Editor), Colin Perry (Editor), Sean Redmond (Editor), Lienors Torre (Editor)

Overview

This book is the first dedicated edited collection that explores the virtualisation of screen-making processes from pre-production to post-production, while attuning to the aesthetic, ideological and performative contexts upended by these integrated technologies. This book explores what is real in virtual production, as a provocative one, implicitly drawing on the philosophies of the moving image and the recent work on new forms of post-human perceptual realism.

This edited collection is divided into the following four themed sections. Section One, It’s Always Been Real: Contemporising Virtual Production, addresses the histories of film realism in relationship to visual technologies, providing both a theoretical and philosophical ‘anchor’ point for the collection, and a necessary genealogy. Section Two, The Body Becomes You: Performing Virtual Production, examines the transformation that occurs in immersive virtual worlds, while also exploring how the body is itself virtualised. Section Three, Skin Deep: Gazing with Virtual Production, addresses the way race, ethnicity, gender and environment are supposedly equalised, and yet are still found to reproduce the colonised looking regimes of western, mainstream screen culture. Section Four, Whose Work? Labouring with Virtual Production, draws together writing that examines the way production processes have been transformed, affecting not only work patterns but also the way aesthetics, form and function, operate.

This book encompasses many production themes and will appeal to media students and professionals interested in the production of film.

Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032730721
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/24/2025
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sean Redmond is Professor of Cinema at RMIT University, Australia.

Colin Perry is a Film and Television lecturer at Deakin University. His background as a director, editor, sound engineer and academic all contribute to the breadth of knowledge he brings to this subject.

Sian Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Animation at Deakin University, Australia. She is also the Festival Director and co-founder of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival.

Lienors Torre is a Senior Lecturer in Animation at Deakin University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Virtual Production: What is Real? Section One: It’s Always Been Real: Contemporising Virtual Production 1. ‘This is the Way’: ILM’s Stagecraft, Disney’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Constructing the Rhetoric of Virtual Production 2. Virtual Production and the History of Attractions 3. Reengineering Rear Projection? A Genealogy of Virtual Production Spaces and their Aesthetic and Logistical Potential 4. Unreal Spaces, Real Peripheries: Exploring the Materialities of Virtual Production 5. Redefining Perceptual Reality:  A Cinematic Phenomenology of Virtual Production Section Two: The Body Becomes You: Performing Virtual Production 6. Facilitating an Immersive Performance Environment in Virtual Production 7.  Virtual Production and the Future of Live Performance – intermedial trajectories of expanded animation in the immersive production Dream (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2021) 8. Animated Presence in Virtual Production 9. Immersive Staging Techniques in Virtual Production: The Profilmic Phase of Avatar, Miriam Meriam Ouertani Section Three: Skin Deep: Gazing with Virtual Production 10. Race, Identity and Virtual Production: Passing through the Technology 11. Photogrammetric Race-Making in the MetaHuman Creator 12. Decolonising Virtual Production? – Optimising Skin-tone Representations and Aesthetics in an LED Volume with Personal Colour Analysis 13. Virtual Screens and the Human Gaze Section Four: Whose Work? Labouring with Virtual Production 14. Performing Pandora: Virtual Production and the Profilmic Event in ‘Avatar’ 15. Sound Design and Virtual Production: Implementing Sound in a Pre-Production Workflow 16. Lost in the virtual abyss: female participation and experience in Virtual Production industry and educational contexts in Australia 17. Intimate Frames: Intimacy and performance in virtual production 18.  Towards the Engine Cinema: The Virtual Production in Chinese Film Industries

Editorial Reviews

The Screens of Virtual Production is the most comprehensive and authoritative work I’ve read on precisely what happened with the advent of digital virtual technologies of production and consumption. While the collection is an astute and imaginative engagement with film history, theory, and philosophy, what also sets the volume apart is its engagement with the nuances of how virtual images and screens work in their myriad forms. The book demonstrates that virtuality was and is not only a technology, but a way of making meaning and power. This is a major work in the field.”

 -Associate Professor Bruce Isaacs, Chair of Film Studies, School of Arts, Communication, and English (SACE), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney 

“The Screens of Virtual Production is a thought-provoking exploration of how virtual production is revolutionizing the art of filmmaking. This collection offers bold, incisive insights into the intersections of technology, performance, representation, and labor. It’s more than just timely—it’s a vital, overdue contribution that redefines how we understand the future of screen media. A must-read for scholars, creators, and anyone eager to grasp the profound ways virtual production is reshaping reality itself.”

-Professor Angela Ndalianis, Professor Emeritus, Centre for Transformative Media Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology

“A brilliant, sweeping introduction to the illusions, ideologies, and innovations of virtual production. Mitchell, Perry, Redmond, and Torre conjure cinema’s technological genealogy – and future – with rigor and wonder. Rich in theory and history, the book challenges our assumptions about realism, spectacle, and power—an essential, dazzling resource for international screen scholars, students, and professionals alike.”

-Daniel Bernardi, Professor of Cinema, San Francisco State University, USA

From the Publisher