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Industrial design processes have several common denominators regardless of the actual design. This is to say that the production of moving images is a kind of design process. Even though every single film- or TV-production is unique, the production processes as such are often similar. Therefore we suggest that a Distributed Creativity Workflow Model will be useful in film- and TV-production. This model will facilitate the design process and make the production of contemporary audio-visual material more cost effective. Hopefully more time can be spent on creativity within the process.

Production of moving images is turning completely digital. This leads to new possibilities and new constraints for creativity within film and TV production chains.

This paper describes professionals’ current comprehension of the consequences of the shift from celluloid to digital technologies, within the Swedish Moving Image Industry. New technologies bring new workflows, new design processes and new constraints.

We aim to illuminate factors that affect design creativity in digital moving image production, by addressing questions about production related responses to the digital turn as well as the affects of such responses on creativity.

Inspired by Ingar Brinck’s creativity theories (1999, 2007) we view aesthetic problem solving as a cognitive process and suggest creative spaces to be the critical phenomenon to manage. We also use organization theories, particularly the work of Katherine Miller (2011) to explain why creativity ought to be a primary management concern.

The empirical material used is semi-structured interviews with management personnel in Swedish moving image production companies. Outcomes include that the variety of digital formats available today is hard for crafts people to overview. This has brought costly workflow constraints that largely limit creativity.

We suggest a pre-production file format check-list as a tool to support design management.

This article analyses how creativity in the making of films and TV is constrained as a consequence of the shift to digital production technology, and the resulting change in work activities for different crafts involved in the postproduction process. We adapt the concept of creative spaces in order to describe these constraints, and we introduce the term audiovisual assemblies to facilitate an analysis of collaboration. We argue that this study is well-accomplished by analyzing collections of existing media productions. We identify two contradicting practices: first, the development of new conventions which reallocate roles and resources in the making of audiovisual assemblies, and second, the high rate and broad range of incremental technological change which demand unconventional, but creative, problem-solving practices from everyone involved. Examples are provided from an innovative Swedish TV-production.