media studies

Over the course of the 2008 Presidential election cycle, I wrote a series of articles tracing the phenomenon of political mashups, videos that reworked scenes and characters from famous movies in order to comment on the election, whether to support a specific candidate or to tarnish the brand of a rival candidate. ... read more »

At one of the many preschools that my children have attended, there’s a sign that serves as one of the key rules: “You can’t say that you can’t play.” At its core is the basic message that if somebody wants to join in, you’ve got to let them. ... read more »

During a recent visit to Wilmington, North Carolina, the Best Girlfriend Ever and I dropped by EUE Screen Gems Studios for their tour. ... read more »

This is some of my talk for “Sensory Communication: Expressive Culture and Youth Media” at UCSD, April, 2010.

I will also present it to my CGU Cultural Studies Graduate course, Visual Research Methods, as an example of new media scholarship on “digital storytelling” and hope they will respond with some tough questions and insights that track some of the ideas of our course (so make sure to read comments!) ... read more »

Note: This is the first in a series of reviews of films that played at this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham. ... read more »

While I mostly blog on media culture, this is my second effort in a matter of days that reviews a book. If anything, I’ve probably always been more of a reader than a media-buff. However, I turned to film and videos in college, as an academic/political choice, given that I deduced that work in this realm would be where the real cultural action would take place during my professional/activist life. I haven’t looked back.

However, I’ve been thinking more about writing these days (here) because of my in-the-wings all-digital scholarly YouTube publication (three positive reviews from the Press, Yes!, awaiting a contract…) and the questions it raises about moving scholarly projects to other forums and the tough connected issues of vernacular, audience, translation, form (discussed in my previous blog on Praxis.) ... read more »

I was fascinated to learn (originally via Nikki Finke) that the Producers Guild of America has officially approved a new credit, transmedia producer, for people who oversee the expansion of a textual universe across multiple media platforms.  As Finke and Scott Macauley (among others) point out, much of the credit for shepherding this new position into being goes to Jeff Gomez of Starlight Entertainment, who has worked on a range of transmedia projects, including Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers, and Avatar (and discussed the importance of transmedia textuality here).  The credit goes a long way toward acknowledging the difficulty of maintaining textual consistency across a vareity of media platforms and toward recognizing the ways in which fans engage with popular texts through multiple iterations.  There are many positive aspects to this decision, including the basic recognition that a significant portion of our entertainment today is not contained within a single text.  It’s also cool that the PGA includes “marketing texts” within the definition of what a transmedia producer might oversee. ... read more »

This is most of my talk for an upcoming Symposium, New Media: Theory, Practice, Power for Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Arts and Society focusing on creating fuller interaction across the arts and humanities (the pages I will show at the talk from my YouTube publication, currently under review so also under wraps, are not included in this blog entry). ... read more »

There is a great discussion about the place of visual effects in the film industry that I stumbled across on Twitter.  I don’t have time to do justice to the nuances of the debate, but here are some highlights: ... read more »

Although I was critical of Edward Jay Epstein’s most recent book, The Hollywood Economist, one of the book’s undeniable strengths is its description of the complex, even labyrinthine, financing models that have evolved around the production of movies. ... read more »