Speaker: Dr Leon Gurevitch, Visiting Professor, University of California Santa Barbara
Over the last few decades a large and globally distributed digital image production industry has arisen from the periphery of Hollywood’s traditional base in Los Angeles. As Hollywood visual effects production began to adopt computational processes, practices and technologies, what started out as a branch of the IT and computer sciences industry became a hybrid. Neither ‘inside’ the Hollywood studios traditional financial structures, nor entirely outside the value chains attached to Hollywood’s film output, the VFX industries have functioned as networks of precarious creative industrial labour offering work for hire on a film by film, contract by contract basis. All of this has lead to an industry defined by migration of labour to an extent that has dwarfed even traditional Hollywood production.
Beyond visual effects, this industrial structure has been replicated in both games production, advertising and the tech sector.
This talk will consider the effects of precarious labour, migration and its implications for the future of the global creative industries increasingly governed by computational production pipelines. Central to this research are both quantitative and qualitative research approaches that have mixed interviews with movie, games and animation professionals (Pixar, Dreamworks, ILM, Weta Digital, Blizzard, Square Enix) with a big data migration visualisation tool. The tool (pictured right) details the migration pathways of 80,000 digital image professionals - animators, coders, engineers and artists - across industry and the world over the past 30 years in order to unpick the networked relationships between software, source code, skills migration and precarious labour in the global creative Industries.
Biography
Dr. Leon Gurevitch is Visiting Professor in the Film and Media Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and until recently, Senior Research Fellow on the Cultural Analytics Program in the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles. Back in New Zealand Leon is Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Design and a Royal Society of New Zealand Research Scholar. Leon is an Associate Editor of Animation: A Disciplinary Journal has published his work in Continuum Journal, The Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, The Journal of Television and New Media, Senses of Cinema, and others. Leon currently lectures graduate and postgraduate courses in photographic and computational culture.
Contact
QUT School of Design
