Reimagining Filmmaking: Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Production, and Transnational Collaboration in the Redefinition of Filmmaking Labor and Narrative

I critically examine how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Production (VP) transform filmmaking labor, transnational collaboration, and narrative practices, challenging techno-optimist discourses prevalent in scholarship on these innovations. While VP reduces post-production costs and enables real-time manipulation of virtual environments (Bodini et al., 2024; Livingstone, 2024), I move beyond efficiency metrics to interrogate how these tools reconfigure cultural production. Drawing on Williams’ (1974) sociotechnical framework and Manovich’s (2001) new media theory, I question what constitutes the “new” in filmmaking and how technological shifts reshape traditional production hierarchies and storytelling paradigms.

Through a production ethnography of my three short sci-fi VP films—one directed remotely from China, using a VP studio in Seoul, and the other two as associate producer with Singaporean and Korean studios—I reveal VP’s disruption of hierarchical workflows. In-Camera Visual Effects (ICVFX) and AI collapse boundaries between pre-production, filming, and post-production, enabling unprecedented collaboration among directors, VFX artists, art directors (both physical and virtual), game engineers, and AI developers. Transnational VP workflows necessitate radical labor renegotiations: directors adopt iterative, non-linear storytelling while manipulating virtual environments in real time, and specialized teams like the Virtual Art Department (VAD) “Brain Bar” assume cinematographic roles, destabilizing traditional departmental divisions. These shifts are mediated by cross-cultural communication barriers, time-zone disparities, and institutional power asymmetries.

I argue that VP transcends operational efficiency, generating dialectical tensions between creative liberation and hierarchical reinscription. While VP empowers filmmakers to bypass geographic and budgetary constraints, it demands renegotiations of creative authority — evident in directors’ scriptwriting, real-time adjustments to lighting and backdrops, and VAD teams’ encroachment on cinematographers’ domains. Transnational collaborations complicate these dynamics through competing institutional practices. By foregrounding practitioners’ lived experiences, I contribute to debates on technology’s role in cultural production, demonstrating that cinematic “newness” emerges not from tools alone, but from evolving intersections of globalized labor, creative practice, and narrative experimentation.