Digital bricolage: Resources and coordination in the production of digital visual effects

The advent of digital technologies has led to profound changes in the creative industries, including the digitization of resources and the consequential fragmentation and greater physical distance of work practices. Looking at the production of digital visual effects for film production, this paper asks how collective digital bricolage is enabled by specific resources and involves particular coordination mechanisms. Based on a large set of interviews with industry experts, we identify the important role of two dominant coordination principles: "narrative alignment", i.e. a scene's contribution to an overall storyline, and "verisimilitude", which we define as a sense of perceptual realism. Together, these two principles facilitate collective bricolage in an increasingly fragmented and specialized professional field. Conceptually, we develop the notion of 'digital bricolage', which relies on digital assets and tools, and emphasize the need to study the impact of digitization on the nature of resources and on the coordination mechanisms emerging in specific creative industries.