A previs society once defined its own craft online

The image

The item at hand is not a single frame but a homepage: the self-description page of an organization that called itself the Previsualization Society, reachable today at previssociety.com. Archived by the Wayback Machine, the page states in its own words that the group was "Formed in 2009" as a non-profit "dedicated to the advancement and development of previsualization, or 'previs'". A companion page, titled What is Previs?, sets out a formal definition of the craft, attributed not to the Society itself but to the ASC-ADG-VES Joint Technology Subcommittee on Previsualization. Visiting the live domain today shows a different image entirely: a bare notice that the site is under construction.

What the documents show

The archived About the Society page documents a stated purpose: fostering "an interdisciplinary community" spanning feature film, television, commercials, games, visualization and architecture, and promoting "effective applications, standards and practices." It names no single founder and credits no one company with inventing previs; the craft definition it reproduces is sourced to a joint industry subcommittee, not to the Society. That distinction matters for anyone tempted to treat a trade group's homepage as the origin story of a technique. What the record does not show is any code of conduct; none appears in the archived captures checked for this entry, and the current previssociety.com offers no membership terms or conduct policy as retrieved on 16 September 2026.

Production context

Editorially, the Society's stated scope reads as an attempt to formalize a discipline that had already spread beyond its studio origins by the time the group organized: previs vendors were serving directors, previs supervisors were being credited on major productions, and tools ranged from block animation to motion-capture stages. The Society's own pages list membership categories for professional, associate, educational and general members, suggesting an audience of working previs artists and adjacent departments such as art direction, rather than a single vendor's customer base. That the current site has gone quiet is itself a small piece of production history: a trade body's homepage is not a permanent record.

Reference versus imitation

Because the Society credited a named subcommittee for its core definition rather than claiming authorship of the craft, its archived pages model a defensible form of citation: attribute the specific document, not the general field. A reference researcher can safely quote the ASC-ADG-VES definition with that same attribution. What would cross into imitation is presenting the Society's homepage language as an authoritative history of previs, or asserting a precise founding narrative beyond the one dated self-description the group itself published.

• Does the organization's own page credit a specific author for any definition it reproduces?
• Is the live version of a source page the same one being quoted, or has it since gone dark?
• What does the absence of a document, such as a code of conduct, tell a researcher that its presence would not?

A trade group's self-description is useful evidence of how a field described itself at a point in time, not proof of how it works today; the gap between the 2009-era pages and the current placeholder is worth noting in any citation.