Software, Animation and the Moving Image: What’s in the Box?

From its early use in the Oscar winning effects of The Matrix to its continuing use in films such as Hugo and The Dark Knight Rises, the feature length animations Rango and Epic, and games such as Journey, Autodesk Maya is pre-eminent amongst animation packages. It is used in the visual effects, advertising, and television industries, science visualizations and the games sector. Much insightful work exists on the creative opportunities image software offers filmmakers, but less attention has been paid to the software. This paper presents a study of Autodesk Maya informed by software studies, and explores what thinking through software adds to debates about digital images. The user interface of Maya is a hybrid space, the familiar spaces of objects coexisting with the more intangible spaces of software processes and procedures. The latter are visible through a range of materials: interviews carried out with animators working within different industrial sectors, as well as training and publicity materials. Critical approaches relying on photorealism and representational strategies draw digital entities into the world inhabited by humans, and discursively treat them as though they are a little like us. Exploring digital space in this way gives access to digital space as digital space. It is a space that is intangible and computational, and plays a structuring part in all kinds of ways.