Dominic Lees

University of Reading, Film, Theatre, and Television, Faculty Member

University for the Creative Arts, Film and Media, Faculty Member

University of the West of England, Department of Film and Journalism, Faculty Member

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Associate Professor of Filmmaking, at the University of Reading. I am research active in the field of synthetic media, deepfakes and immersive technologies and their impact on creative practice in the screen industries. My practice research project, 'Virtual Maggie' (2020), experimented with deepfakes in film drama, exploring the ethics of the digital performer and the legal issues around the resurrection of public figures. I lead the Synthetic Media Research Network, a collaboration of research and industry stakeholders which has held events supported by The AlanTuring Institute and the AHRC. We would be very pleased to hear from new participants.

During my professional screen industry career I directed over 40 episodes of television drama, shorts and the award-winning feature film, 'Outlanders' (2008), and worked as a screenwriter. My current work links this screen industry background with teaching and academic research.

I have published in academic and mainstream media on the subject of deepfakes. I have also co-authored a monograph on recent high-end US television drama, for Bloomsbury Academic, with specific attention to style and TV performance.
Address: Department of Film, Theatre and Television, Minghella Studios, University of Reading, Whitenights Campus, Reading RG6 6BT, UK.

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Books by Dominic Lees

Seeing It on Television: Televisuality in the Contemporary US ‘High-end’ Series by Max Sexton and Dominic Lees

Seeing It On Television, 2021

Seeing It on Television: Televisuality in the Contemporary US 'High-end' Series investigates new ... more Seeing It on Television: Televisuality in the Contemporary US 'High-end' Series investigates new categories of high-end drama and explores the appeal of programmes from Netflix, Sky Atlantic/HBO, National Geographic, FX and Cinemax. An investigation of contemporary US Televisuality provides insight into the appeal of upscale programming beyond facts about its budget, high production values and/or feature cinematography. Rather, this book focuses on how the construction of meaning often relies on cultural discourse, production histories, as well as on tone, texture or performance, which establishes the locus of engagement and value within the series. Max Sexton and Dominic Lees discuss how complex production histories lie behind the rise of the US high-end series, a form that reflects industrial changes and the renegotiation of formal strategies. They reveal how the involvement of many different people in the production process, based on new relationships of creative authority, complicates our understanding of 'original content'. This affects the construction of stylistics and the viewing strategies required by different shows. The cultural, as well as industrial, strategies of recent television drama are explored in The Young Pope, The Knick, Stranger Things, Mars, Fargo, The Leftovers, Boardwalk Empire, and Vinyl.

Many Ways of Directing a Film: Teaching the 'Modes of Creative Practice'

The 21st Century Film, TV & Media School: Directing the Future, 2019

The ideas in this chapter spring from a simple observation, that the title ‘Film Director’ does n... more The ideas in this chapter spring from a simple observation, that the title ‘Film Director’ does not tell us much about the rich and varied nature of the profession - it is a little like using the term ‘Artist’ without the multiple subcategories of painter/sculptor/illustrator/printmaker. This chapter proposes that we can identify patterns of difference in how film directors work, sorting them into coherent schemes of creative practice, in order to generate clear pedagogic significance for film education. Although the systems of creative practice initiated by film directors are highly varied, those variations can be grouped together into different ‘Modes’, with each having distinct features. I outline here the ideas around three such Modes of Creative Practice. In doing so, my intention is to begin a process of evolving a Theory of Film Practice relating to the making of screen fiction.

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Journal Articles by Dominic Lees

The digital resurrection of Margaret Thatcher: Creative, technological and legal dilemmas in the use of deepfakes in screen drama

by Dominic Lees and Marcus Keppel-Palmer

Convergence, 2021

This article develops from the findings of an interdisciplinary research project that has linked ... more This article develops from the findings of an interdisciplinary research project that has linked film practice research with computer science and law, in an exercise that seeks to digitally resurrect Margaret Thatcher to play herself in a contemporary film drama. The article highlights the imminent spread of machine learning techniques for digital face replacement across fiction content production, with central research questions concerning the ethical and legal issues that arise from the appropriation of the facial image of a deceased person for use in drama.

Fargo: Seeing the significance of style in television poetics? By Max Sexton and Dominic Lees

by Dominic Lees and Max Sexton

Critical Studies in Television, 2019

Critical Studies in Television Journal **This article explores how the original film was adapted ... more Critical Studies in Television Journal **This article explores how the original film was adapted to television and how a strain of art or independent cinema contributed to the development of the first series of Fargo. By making this comparison, the transition to television of the storyworld established by the Coen brothers raises questions about who is talking in the TV drama – the Coens or the makers of the series? At the same time, Fargo can be more easily explained as a strategy by writers, directors and producers that complicates ideas to do with Noah Hawley as its showrunner and the show’s single-author status. The article demonstrates how fidelity to the Coen brothers as a testament to the memory of the original film is set against questions about the reliability of storytelling using complex imagery. By alternating between different levels of narration signified by its stylistic tonal qualities, Fargo succeeds in produces multiple meanings, representations and effects that call attention to textual pleasures in the complex television series.** https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/csta/14/3

Improvisation as a research methodology: exploring links between filmmakers’ practice and traditions of enquiry across the academy.

Media Practice and Education, 2019

This article concentrates on one form of creative practice, improvisation, considering how it has... more This article concentrates on one form of creative practice, improvisation, considering how it has been used as an experimental method within filmmaking as well as in research enquiry. Drawing on my professional experience in the field of narrative fiction filmmaking, as well as interviews with film professionals, I show how a close examination of improvising processes opens up illuminating points of comparison with research methodologies across the academy. This article is an interdisciplinary review, drawing together ideas about improvisation beyond film, looking broadly across the creative arts and most pointedly, drawing an unexpected link between practice research in film and the traditions of laboratory research methodologies within Social Psychology.

Cinema and authenticity: anxieties in the making of Historical Film

Journal of Media Practice, 2016

The practice of representing history on film brings the filmmaker into collision with a cluster o... more The practice of representing history on film brings the filmmaker into collision with a cluster of concerns around the authentic. While recent articles have considered the historical documentary and historical dramatization, I seek to extend the debate into narrative fiction film set in historical periods. In this article, I discuss conflicting conceptions of authenticity. Through my own practice-as-research, I examine the decision-making within the preproduction of a historical drama (my short film, The Burning, 2016) in order to demonstrate the ways in which contradictory concepts of authenticity can coexist within a historical film project.

Conference Presentations by Dominic Lees

'Cinema and the Creation of Collective Memories'

Conference paper for 'Journeys Across Media' conference 2014: ‘Memory and Imagination’, Universit... more Conference paper for 'Journeys Across Media' conference 2014: ‘Memory and Imagination’, University of Reading,Department of Film, Theatre and Television, 25th April 2014

ABSTRACT:
In 1970, anthropologist Roger Bastide wrote of
the chorus of voices that address the issue of memories about the past. Some members of the chorus are closer to the microphone, others have louder voices, but no one orchestrates them in a unified way.

Filmmakers are among the closest to the microphone and have some of the loudest voices in establishing our collective memories of the past. They take us beyond the theoretical discussion of social memory pursued by Maurice Halbswach, and the broad area of scholarship that is sometimes called ‘cultural memory studies’: when narrative filmmakers create images of the past, they are directly contributing to a common visual memory of events before our lifetime.

This paper looks at cinematic imageries of history and how film embeds common visions into the collective perceptions of our past. My interest is in the patterns of visual recreation of the past and how filmmakers choose to reproduce or disrupt collective memories. Issues of authenticity, verisimilitude and pure fiction are explored through studies of filmmaker choices.

The majority of recent writing on memory and film has focussed on the cinema of recent history, in particular those traumas of the twentieth century lying just within the boundaries of oral history. In this sense, these films use actual visual memories, frequently exploiting documentary and archival images to reinforce specific images of the past. My study will look at the filmic recreation of more distant history, examining how a photographic medium establishes shared visual memories of eras pre-dating the advent of photography.

Developing from Stubbs’s 2013 work on ‘Historical Film’, the paper will include close analysis of certain examples of Tudor English costume drama. I incorporate my own practice-as-research into this analysis, looking at the detailed decision-making involved in the pre-production of my forthcoming Short Film, ‘The Burning’, set in 1588. This final element will reveal and challenge some of the choices that cultural producers may make when engaging in the reproduction of cinematic memories.

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Papers by Dominic Lees

The Digital Face and Deepfakes on Screen

by Lisa Bode and Dominic Lees

Though long fundamental to portraiture, cinema, television, and surveillance, the human face is e... more Though long fundamental to portraiture, cinema, television, and surveillance, the human face is emerging as a central object of critical ambivalence in the digital era. Tensions across the face’s many functions as biological fact and image, as social identity marker, as interface between private self and public space, as site of self-revelation, as mask, and as commodity, are increasingly troubled. On the one hand, the face’s biometric coordinates act as passwords for devices, and identity markers to track our activities and movements through security checkpoints and shopping malls. On the other, the face as image and its intimate, inviolable connection to the human subject is becoming more and more fluid and unstable, due to the rise of digital imaging and manipulation technologies. The transformative and transfiguring powers of makeup and masks have long been with us, but on our screens, both large and intimate, the face can now be filtered, copied, iterated, deaged, deepfaked, an...

Deepfakes in documentary film production: images of deception in the representation of the real

Studies in Documentary Film, Nov 27, 2023