On an airfield in France in 1918, a group of desperate soldiers run through the open doors of a large aircraft hanger. As they emerge, the hanger begins to explode behind them, blasts of flame and debris flaring up in the doorway. But this exciting scene from a blockbuster Hollywood film is rudely interrupted – the image slows and then freezes, before detaching from the edges of our viewing screen. The now-mobile film frame swings to the side, so we view it as a parallelogram within an otherwise blank void. Multiple other parallelograms quickly manifest in a line in front of the original, each one containing different pieces of that first image. Before we have a chance to digest this carved-up series, the numerous slices re-converge into a single plane, and this plane swings back to once more occupy the entire frame of the video we are watching. The soldiers resume their running, albeit with an even greater fireball behind them, a fireball which we now understand – albeit only quite dimly and generally – to be at least partly the product of digital visual effects work.

Generated using programs like Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya, Adobe After Effects, and NUKE, the digital effects of contemporary cinema and television are most often outsourced to effects companies rather than made by the production personnel of a given film or show. Larger media productions will contract a range of companies to complete the many hundreds of visual effects shots, insertions, and clean-ups required by today's digital media ecology of spectacle. Described above is a brief moment from a short video by the effects and post-production studio Universal Production Partners (UPP), showcasing their work on the major blockbuster film Wonder Woman (2017). It is available on the company's website, where it is listed as a ‘Showreel’ (UPP n.d.), and also on YouTube, where it was re-posted in 2018 by the FilmIsNow Movie Bloopers and Extras account under the title ‘Wonder Woman – VFX Breakdown by UPP’. In the former context, it advertises UPP's technical capacities to prospective clients; in the latter, it is likely to be encountered by a more general audience (including fans of the film and those broadly interested in visual effects spectacle).