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.

This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access Rethinks the historical and theoretical relationship between animation, mathematics, and engineering by studying software tools used to animate. unpredictable phenomena Offers a glimpse into the economic and institutional machine that is constantly producing the cycle of media technology emergence, dominance, and residue Develops a theoretical framework for understanding how knowledge is created through making media apparatuses and artifices

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

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.