Through his work, Suryansu Guha uplifts overlooked creativity in the film industry.

On July 31, the Film, Television and Digital Media PhD student was named the second-place winner of the Student Writing Award from The Society for Cinema Media Studies. Earning this prize with the piece “‘Keeping the Head and Outsourcing the Hands’: India and the ‘Back-end Hub’ of the Global Visual Effects Animation Industry,” the cinema media studies student said the paper is an edited version of the second chapter of his dissertation. It focuses on visual effects artists, highlighting the importance of below-the-line workers who are often overlooked in the industry.

“There are these below-the-line crafts whose work, whose labor, whose creativity sort of gets congealed and gets absorbed and subsumed into the larger idea of creativity that is represented by the directors or the filmmakers,” he said.

Guha said a defining moment of why he chose to target visual effects (VFX) in his research happened while waiting for a Marvel movie’s post-credit scene, in which he found himself not knowing many of the post-production positions mentioned in the credits. As a film student, he said this was an eye-opener, pushing him to start thinking about why people did not know or care about these crafts. Later he found out that visual effects are a craft not studied by many film scholars due to it being a technical-driven field, contributing to the industry’s unawareness of the VFX line and its working conditions, Guha said.

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Guha said to understand the VFX industry and its organizations, making sense of the people who are part of it is crucial as it allows him to better understand the companies’ values. Guha’s faculty mentor and TFT professor Steve Anderson, said Guha’s work merges the study of both media and those making it while still focusing on underrepresented workers. Anderson, who is also the associate dean of academic affairs in the School of the Arts and Architecture, added that this is what sets him apart from other scholars.

“People who do Hollywood studies only want to talk to directors, maybe writers, maybe producers, but they’re sure not talking to anybody who’s doing back-end programming for visual effects,” Anderson said. “This is a really important and relatively recent addition to the field, paying attention to those kinds of labor issues, the people who are making films, rather than just the stars.”

In the essay submitted for the Student Writing Award, Guha specifically addresses the misconception of creative VFX decisions being made by film studios, when in reality, outsourced visual effects artists are making these decisions while getting no credit or royalties for their work. He chose this section of his doctoral thesis for the award as he said it was not only the biggest find on his research at the time but also a conversation that needed to happen in the industry as soon as possible.

Although he didn’t get to publish his piece as a second-place winner, Guha said his goal of starting this discussion was met at some level because qualifying for the award has brought a lot of attention from peers. Additionally, he said this attention has provided him not only credibility in the field, especially when doing interview-based work, but also reassurance that his work has an impact on the industry.

Denise Mann, a professor in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media and co-chair of Guha’s dissertation committee, said Guha is a very quick learner and extremely active in the film studies field, always accomplishing everything he set his mind to. Mann also said seeing Guha win such a competitive award is gratifying as it makes her feel she’s doing something right as a mentor.

“I think it’s important that his peers and future people that hire him and want to work with him know his work,” Mann said. “That’s what’s so great about these kinds of (awards) where you’re singled out among 100 people and then your work is singled out.”

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Guha said he’s extremely interested in visual effects because it’s a craft where many people work together to produce just a few seconds of a movie. This is why he said he finds it unfair that movies are only credited to a single person as it dismisses the input of other collaborators. He said this creates an uneven distribution of power in the industry, an issue that partially happens due to the lack of work focusing on it.

“There’s this propensity in us as humans to attribute… we need to find a person we can credit this work of art with, and that person is usually the director,” Guha said. “But my work shows through many key studies how… what is understood as their directorial, artistic vision and their choices are actually not their choices at all. They are choices made by the people that they hired, the people whose creative labor is sort of subsumed.”