FOCUS PULLER: MATERIAL OBJECTS IN VIRTUAL PRODUCTION

This paper examines Virtual Production (VP) technology through practice-led research, questioning how LED volume studios reshape relationships between human performers and their environments. Drawing on fieldwork at DreamScreen Australia's commercial VP studio, the research project Focus Puller (2024) investigates VP's technological limitation: the need to keep background environments deliberately out of focus to prevent LED screens from fracturing into visible pixels. This constraint becomes a philosophical prompt for examining how VP enforces hierarchies between foreground human actors and background environments, systematically excluding non-human agency and material contingency.