This book is the first dedicated edited collection that explores the virtualization of screen-making processes from pre-production to post-production, while attuning to the aesthetic, ideological and performative contexts upended by these integrated technologies. This book explores what is real in virtual production, as a provocative one, implicitly drawing on the philosophies of the moving image and the recent work on new forms of post-human perceptual realism.

This edited collection is divided into the following four themed sections. Section One, It’s Always Been Real: Contemporising Virtual Production, addresses the histories of film realism in relationship to visual technologies, providing both a theoretical and philosophical ‘anchor’ point for the collection, and a necessary genealogy. Section Two, The Body Becomes You: Performing Virtual Production, examines the transformation that occurs in immersive virtual worlds, while also exploring how the body is itself virtualised. Section Three, Skin Deep: Gazing with Virtual Production, addresses the way race, ethnicity, gender and environment are supposedly equalised, and yet are still found to reproduce the colonised looking regimes of western, mainstream screen culture. Section Four, Whose Work? Labouring with Virtual Production, draws together writing that examines the way production processes have been transformed, affecting not only work patterns but the way aesthetics, form and function, operate.

This book encompasses many production themes and will appeal to media students and professionals interested in the production of film.