| Jones, Bethan, Jones, Nick, Swords, Jon and Willment, Nina 2025. Unreal spaces, real peripheries: Exploring the materialities of virtual production. Mitchell, S., Perry, C., Redmond, S. and Torre, L., eds. The Screens of Virtual Production: What is Real?, London: Routledge, pp. 62-75. (10.4324/9781003463139-6) |
Abstract
Many consider virtual production (VP) to be a “game-changer” in the media industries, without necessarily defining exactly what game is being changed and how. Proponents and industry marketing material proclaim its ability to speed up production activities even as it creates apparently highly immersive environments, all while being designed go unnoticed by viewers. Yet VP is in many ways not invisible. The spaces created by VP approaches are influenced by the practices and affordances of the technologies involved, which favour particular compositions and architectures, and necessitate particular workflows and infrastructure. In this chapter, we consider the impacts of VP from perspectives so far peripheral to discussions of the transformational potential of VP, focusing on spectatorial, touristic, and legal changes. To do this we explore how VP approaches intersect with the materiality of filmmaking in the ‘real world’, through the lens of different geographies. We examine four areas that could be seen as extraneous to discussion in much research on VP, but that we argue are nonetheless still vital to our understandings of the technology: how VP is materially changing infrastructural requirements and the environmental credentials of productions; the technical affordances VP provides and how this alters the what we see on screen; the implications of VP on film tourism; the legal issues of how places are depicted through virtual environments. Each of these issues speaks to the changing geographies of filmmaking at different stages of a production’s life.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Publication |
| Status: | Published |
| Schools: | Schools > Journalism, Media and Culture |
| Publisher: | Routledge |
| ISBN: | 9781003463139 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Dec 2025 12:00 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/183366 |
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