Writing this book, five years on from the temporal origin of its focus of study, the film industry and film production has continued to be impacted by digital interventions in innumerable ways. Since 2012, new creative and logistical responses to technological innovations have proliferated, resulting in new types of film production and new exhibition practices. Subsequent watershed moments include the artistic and technological achievements of Gravity (2013) in its pure-digital aestheticism and technical accomplishments; and the live distribution and ‘live’ production aesthetics of Lost in London LIVE (2017). Both examples exemplify the total convergence of both the spaces of and times of production in the context of a pure digital film-production economy and ecology. However, as Figure 7.1 illustrates, a clapper board from Lost in London LIVE (2017) features in the associated making-of film, and is emblematic of the film-to-digital moment which we still inhabit. It is truly a redundant piece of production iconography in this instance, since the film was shot in one take, with one camera, and was broadcast live. Yet the clapper board still persists as the key visual signifier as to the ontology of the feature film. Nonetheless, these two examples each demonstrate how the continued convergences of industries, software and working practices have directed the research agenda across a number of academic fields to these emergent phenomena, fuelling debates concerning issues such as emerging models of labour organisation and new forms of production.

The vantage point of 2017 has enabled me to retrospectively position the film, Ginger & Rosa, its study, and the Production Aesthetic, in their respective lineages of film history and film analysis. From this critical distance, it is possible to appreciate how and why 2012 was a key defining moment for film in the UK, liminally poised at this celluloid/ digital impasse, at which the two mediums co-existed and converged most vividly through the envisioning of its Production Aesthetic. This Production Aesthetic, now redolent with and evocative of that particular moment which retained, preserved and enshrined the celluloid, the film, in the digital, emerged in a specific independent craft-based mode of production. As such it was able to illuminate the film-to-data transitional moment most acutely as the final locus of resistance in the film-industry ecology.