Abstract or Keywords
In 2019, the film industry widely touted that the future of moving image production had virtually arrived. Disney’s live-action remake of The Lion King (2019), which employed groundbreaking virtual cinematography techniques, was the second-highest grossing film of the year. That same year Disney+’s episodic The Mandalorian (2019- ) garnered attention for successfully deploying video game software to create photorealistic environments that plunged viewers back into the Star Wars universe. Strikingly, these flagship virtual productions employed the new technology not to visualize never-before seen times, spaces, or bodies, but rather to recreate twentieth-century cultural products. As I will argue, this tendency towards nostalgia and control over time has been an aspect of virtual production since its emergence in the late 1990s. From the beginning, virtual productions have engaged the past as a source of immersion and interaction. Along these lines, this presentation will consider the tendency of virtual production techniques – virtual cinematography, in-camera visual effects, and motion capture de-aging – to turn back time as a reflection of a new structure of feeling in the twenty-first century.
While late twentieth-century cultural products such as Star Wars represented the postmodern conception of the end to history by looking back to the past through nostalgia and pastiche, early twenty-first century metamodern culture has explored the return of history, where reversion to the past offers a means to a new future (van den Akker 2017). Discourse about virtual production has similarly highlighted its ability to rework traditional film production’s assembly line structure into a nonlinear, iterative process more akin to software development, including the ability to revert to previous versions. Through examples from The Matrix trilogy, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), The Lion King, and The Mandalorian, this presentation will explore virtual production as an avatar of twenty-first century metamodern culture. In their focus on the past as an opportunity for immersion and interaction, virtual productions in the early twenty-first century have repeatedly transformed onscreen spaces and bodies into vehicles for time travel.