School of Art & Media

Most of us take Visual Effects (or VFX) in film for granted. We simply; a) criticise the quality of it or b) don't recognise it's there at all! I fall into the first category so this report will address the complexity, history and technique behind VFX and post- production, as well as give you the reader a look at industry standard practices. By the end of this report you will have a concise in-depth insight into the creative art of VFX production that will equip you with the knowledge you need to understand and appreciate fundamental themes of this vast subject field. It is beyond the scope of this report to investigate every visual effect practice used in industry so I have distilled this text into the core concepts that the complete novice should ʻknowʼ when considering production of a visual effects scene.

For this essay I will begin by introducing the theme of Zombies like a prion into the brainstem of the text, gradually spreading and infecting the rest of the following content. Beginning by using JG Ballard’s High Rise as an exploration of analogues of social hierarchy in other media, moving on to discuss the fear of revolution which Zombies may embody, and their relation to historic depictions of mass murder, particularly in reference to the Nazis dehumanisation of the Holocaust. The conclusion suggests that Zombies may be a fitting zeitgeist for the precariat generation, as part of a public mediated dialogue that seeks to familiarise the demonisation of the Masses, as both body proper and body politic, to a Mass-Media consuming audience, with a particular focus on the influence of Zombie video games and films.

video game characters is used as a means to open up a wider discussion on
modes of protest. The validity and use of different forms of action, particularly methods of historic and contemporary Civil Rights movements is then explored. There is a particular focus on the extent to which someone in a position of privilege can engage in a critique of such hierarchies, without inadvertently acting as a 'White Saviour' or otherwise obscuring the voices of those affected by such struggles.

From here, the mediation and transmission of hateful ideas is then addressed through
the metaphor of a virus, moving into use of pseudoscience as a propaganda tool for
disrupting a shared understanding of reality is then touched upon, with the subsequent
effects in culture being synthesised, whilst addressing the role of different forms of
violence in the disruption of this information exchange. The balance of these contrasting modalities, and how meditation affects them is then used to convey how video games may be a useful non-violent tool for combating problematic ideologies, even those more prominently affecting peoples of which the producer of such material may not be.

Additional historic information, along with broader suppositions, may be found in the
Appendices.