Changes in the Production Departments of IMDB’s Top 250 Movies
We can all picture what stereotypical studio movie production looks like: a set, lights, electrical cables, a painted backdrop of some kind, a director sitting in one of those director chairs. If your imagination is particularly cartoonish, perhaps the director has puffy pants and a monocle like Fritz Lang. Yet media from the past few decades have been reconfiguring the way we imagine film production. Promotional behind-the-scenes footage shows actors in green leotards with reference marks on their faces. VFX show reels demonstrate how the backgrounds of even the most mundane outdoor shots are composited together. Meanwhile, somewhere away from the cameras, scores of international laborers sit at workstations drawing digital images piece by piece. Scholars and industry observes confirm that things are changing. People like John T. Caldwell, Michael Curtin, and Hye Jean Chung point to the strategic and economic motivations behind having a highly flexible, less-unionized, more international labour force of post-production workers.
How great have these changes actually been though? Is there a way we can measure them to get the truth behind these images? How many of the fundamental elements of production have changed and how many have stayed the same? Which ones are in decline and which ones are growing?
To get a preliminary sense of these changes, I looked at data on the top 250 movies between 1975 and 2019 on IMDB. IMDB records all of the job titles on a given movie and sorts these titles in categories like Set Decorators, Stunts, and Animation Department. I took an equal count of movies from each year and counted how frequently these categories appeared.
As the following graphs show, while new departments like Visual Effects, Animation, and Special Effects Companies have grown significantly since 2000, few departments have suffered declines as a result.
Click on the link below any image to access an interactive graph.
Certain Labor Categories Have Not Changed at All
Editors, Writers, and Directors have worked on every single film in the list. Some departments, like Art Department, are not credited on every movie but do not exhibit any particular trend over time.
Few Departments Have Suffered Decline
A few departments exhibited downward trends. The strongest among these were the costume department and the transportation department. Each saw a decrease of about one credit on average if you divide the data before and after 1999. One possible explanation for the transportation department trend is that digital compositing and virtual backgrounds have led to a decrease in shooting on location. The decline in the costume department is rather strange though. Overall, none of these trends were especially strong, and the data tended to be quite noisy.
Many Other Departments Grew
Some of the upward trends were clearer. Animation Department, Visual Effects, and Special Effects Companies (but not Special Effects) all showed clear growth. Animation Department is the strongest of these, with the average number of credits between 1977 and 1993 doubling after 1999. This is likely because it has been buoyed both by the increased popularity of animated features and by the use of animated elements as a part of visual effects. The ascent of special effects company credits over in-house departments suggest more special effects work is being contracted-out by studios, supporting what many industry observers have already noted.
Of all the production departments listed on IMDB, five showed upward trends, two showed downward trends, and 18 showed no significant trend.
Conclusion
While it is clear that certain forms of labour have been becoming more common, they are not necessarily replacing old types of jobs at an equal rate, at least based on this look at department titles in a small sample of the most popular movies. This could be because top movies are employing more people overall, and types of jobs like visual effects are simply being added existing practices.
Data Sources and Methods
I used Davide Alberani’s IMDBPy library for Python to retrieve the top 250 movie list from IMDB’s API. I broke this list into three-year sections. 1975 to 1977 was the oldest section to have a reasonable number of films (12), so I limited all subsequent periods to 12 by pruning random films. This prevented certain years with more films inflating the counts of different departments.
Next, I used IMDB’s API to retrieve “infoset” categories. These included things like production departments, tag lines, and synopses. The presence of departments is what I used for the graphs. The advantage of using categories named by IMDB is that the categories are consistent over time and not subject to changes in nomenclature. Each data point has been smoothed using a moving average of the past two data points to help minimize year-over-year fluctuations and show broader trends.
These numbers do not tell us whether any of these jobs have become more or less secure, unionized, or well compensated. They could also be subject changes in what type of labour is credited (although IMDB has the advantage of not being limited to screen credits).
250 films is a relatively small sample, but these data give us a basic overview of broad trends for the most popular films. For a deeper dive into specifically what job titles have changed in live-action movies using a much larger dataset, see my other article here.
This article is part of a series on the special effects, visual effects, and animation industries. It is based on research supported by:
Le Fonds de Recherche Québécois sur la Société et la Culture Postdoctoral Fellowship
The University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Film & Media
Photo by Kal Visuals
