Not my Job..! Media production roles

Cinema, by its very nature is a collaborative artform involving contributing creative visions and skills from a wide array people. More than a century of cinema production practice has wrought a distinct hierachical structure of roles and responsibilities for all those involved in production. In this light the University of Washington have compiled a very useful on-line list of production roles that details the individual respnsibilities and relatioships of roles in the hierachy. (you can download as a Word Doc)



There’s no doubt that an article like this is very useful for first time movie makers or those learning about media production but such an article also prompts the discussion of the relevence and usefulness of such definitions of role in the digital age. There is much about the way workflow and creative process is altered and re-defined in the digital environment and indeed a great many of the key responsibilities of such roles may need to be re-addressed. For example, lets look at one of the long-standing central roles in any cinematic production, one that has been in place almost since cinema’s inception - the Director of Photography.

Traditionally the DOP’s responsibilities are directly connected with the physical camera - the on set composition and acquisition of the raw image. Once principle photography is complete the DOP’s job is usually over and they have no further role to play. But these parameters are distinctly problematic in the digital age. For the DOP two particular technologies alter their established role. The rise of the DI colour grading process and the advent of RAW cinematography shifts the DOP’s role from purely in the ‘production’ phase to one that stradles Production and Post-Production. DI and RAW processes allow for a wide array of ‘compositional’ choice to be made after the fact of shooting. Exposure, depth of field, colour gamut, white balance and the position of the frame itself are all elements that digital workflow allows to be performed infront of the computer in post-production instead of behind the lens.

The second technology that shifts the traditional role of the DOP is the virtual camera; the shooting and aquistiion of the image inside a virtual environment. Here the act of shooting, which was always inextricably linked to the camera apperatus, is dislocated alltogether to a process of immersing a ‘perspective’ into a 3D space. Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie (Lord of the rings) was recently credited as DOP on Happy Feet, an entirely 3D animated film. His role not to operate a camera but to direct the depiction of the frame. A seemingly simple shift but a none the less profound one. The other penguin animated film, Surfs Up, took the idea further with a ‘hand held’ virtual reality operated camera. The 3D space built, the characters animated into performance and then that ‘performance’ in virtual space, ‘shot’ in real-time with a virtual camera. More than anything what these shifts do is not just blur, but fundementally dispense with, the Production/Post-Production division. Where does production end and Post-Production begin?

We can look also to the central hub of post-production, that of Editing. The role of the editor was once one of filteration and processing - raw images and sound arranged in a meaningful manner. However the evolution from Flatbed to computer-based NLE is much more than just a step from the analogue world to the digital. The functions of the Flatbed are cut and splice and this is a very far cry from the digital NLE. A tool for cut splice is incapable of ‘generating’ media but a digital NLE is more than capable of generating and ‘creating’ media and material from itself that was not part of the external source. Colour grading, particles, filters, masks, mattes, composits, titles, overlays, graphics, animations, textures, backgrounds all created from the NLE - all generated from what was once only process of assembly of externally generated. This is much more than a simple expansion of an editing tool’s features, it calls directly into question the role of the Editor itself. It fundementally blurs the previous definitions of Production as ‘process of aquistion’ and Post-Production as ‘process of assembly’.

Into this mix we can add the widespread hybridization of production roles that digital technology and a parralell cultural shift impliment. Editors who are also compositors; camera operators who are also sound recordists, sound editors who are also music composers; DOP’s who are also animators. We can see these evolutionary hybridizations paired with related shifts in the tools we use and which is leading which is somewhat of a chicken and egg scenario. Editing systems now include complex motion graphics fuctions and as a result responsibilities once sepearted out - compositing, animation - are now falling into the broad job description of Editor. Audio tools have moved from being focused on assembly and editing to integarted musical compsoition. Pitch and tempo correction, time signature control, loop sequencing, software synthesisers. And this too represents for the audio ‘editor’ that shift from a role of processing and assembly, to one that includes content generation as part of its feature set.

This is not to suggest that an audio editor with a loop sequencer is a replacement for a dedicated composer but it does point towards ever evolving production roles and in turn with this eveolution, of the workflow process itself. Nor, likewise, should we negelct the fact that digital technologies make lower-cost production possibe and low-budget productions very often rely on people performing hybrid roles. This has always been the case and is not unique to the digital environment but digital tools do facilitate that hybridization as a core functionality of how they work and therin lies the fundemental shift in our production perceptions.

Whether its the tools leading the process or the process leading the tools is highly debatable but the result is much the same - the line between production and post-production is blurred and in some cases made largely irrelevent. The distiction between processes of ‘aquistion’ and that of ‘assembly’ is made hazy. The once segmented and and hierachical roles of production are now overlapping, inter-mixed and hybridized.