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  • © 2021

Animating Unpredictable Effects

Nonlinearity in Hollywood’s R&D Complex

Palgrave Macmillan

Authors:

  • 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”

Part of the book series: Palgrave Animation (PAANI)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
  2. Introduction: “Fully Nonlinear”

    • Jordan Gowanlock
    Pages 1-15Open Access
  3. Simulation and R&D: Knowing and Making

    • Jordan Gowanlock
    Pages 17-49Open Access
  4. Hollywood’s R&D Complex

    • Jordan Gowanlock
    Pages 51-84Open Access
  5. Animating Management

    • Jordan Gowanlock
    Pages 119-143Open Access
  6. Cinematic Chaos, Catastrophe, and Unpredictable Embrace

    • Jordan Gowanlock
    Pages 145-170Open Access
  7. Conclusion: Engineering Movies

    • Jordan Gowanlock
    Pages 171-180Open Access
  8. Back Matter

    Pages 181-206

About this book

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.



Reviews

“Unpredictable Visual Effects offers important new contexts for thinking about Hollywood blockbusters. This book provides a substantial and important intervention into the fields of cinema studies, effects studies, industrial history, digital aesthetics, and media archeology. Gowanlock asserts the role of Hollywood blockbuster to shape development of computer graphic technologies and makes a very convincing argument for why nonlinear simulation, as a product of the R&D industrial complex, should be a central area of study.” (Julie Turnock, Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Film & Media, University of California, Berkeley, USA

    Jordan Gowanlock

About the author

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. 

 

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Animating Unpredictable Effects

  • Book Subtitle: Nonlinearity in Hollywood’s R&D Complex

  • Authors: Jordan Gowanlock

  • Series Title: Palgrave Animation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74227-0

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-74226-3Published: 29 May 2021

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-74229-4Published: 29 May 2021

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-74227-0Published: 28 May 2021

  • Series ISSN: 2523-8086

  • Series E-ISSN: 2523-8094

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XI, 206

  • Number of Illustrations: 4 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Animation, Film/TV Industry, Film Theory

Buy it now

Buying options

Softcover Book USD 49.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access