Production Studies Mayer, Vicki; Banks, Miranda J; Caldwell, John T
2009, 20090910, 2008-05-01, 2009-05-29
eBook
"Behind-the-scenes" stories of ranting directors, stingy producers, temperamental actors, and the like have fascinated us since the beginnings of film and television. Today, magazines, websites, ...television programs, and DVDs are devoted to telling tales of trade lore—from on-set antics to labor disputes. The production of media has become as storied and mythologized as the content of the films and TV shows themselves.
Production Studies is the first volume to bring together a star-studded cast of interdisciplinary media scholars to examine the unique cultural practices of media production. The all-new essays collected here combine ethnographic, sociological, critical, material, and political-economic methods to explore a wide range of topics, from contemporary industrial trends such as new media and niche markets to gender and workplace hierarchies. Together, the contributors seek to understand how the entire span of "media producers"—ranging from high-profile producers and directors to anonymous stagehands and costume designers—work through professional organizations and informal networks to form communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world.
This landmark collection connects the cultural activities of media producers to our broader understanding of media practices and texts, establishing an innovative and agenda-setting approach to media industry scholarship for the twenty-first century.
Contributors: Miranda J. Banks, John T. Caldwell, Christine Cornea, Laura Grindstaff, Felicia D. Henderson, Erin Hill, Jane Landman, Elana Levine, Amanda D. Lotz, Paul Malcolm, Denise Mann, Vicki Mayer, Candace Moore, Oli Mould, Sherry B. Ortner, Matt Stahl, John L. Sullivan, Serra Tinic, Stephen Zafirau
" Production Studies 's collection of insightful essays by academics from a range of disciplines presents a superb example of precisely the kind of complex, collaborative work their essays elucidate. Incorporating material from interviews with a range of industry professionals, interrogating both industry practices and the scholarship that has explored them, this book speaks to some of the most pressing issues in the current media studies agenda."-- Michele Hilmes , author of NBC: America's Network
"Arriving at a time when the analysis of cultural and material production, in all its forms, has perhaps never been so critical, this rich and diverse collection of essays is a vital contribution to media production studies. The contributors offer a variety of insightful accounts of production culture, approaching it from perspectives including anthropology, cultural studies, feminism, and political economy, and highlighting many different production modes, levels, and locales. Production Studies is the new benchmark for this important and rapidly evolving field, and will influence media scholars and practitioners for years to come."-- Derek Kompare , author of Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television
Vicki Mayer is Assistant Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She is author of Producing Dreams , Consuming Youth: Mexican Americans and Mass Media .
Miranda J. Banks is Assistant Professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College.
John Thornton Caldwell is Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA. He has authored and edited several books, including Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television , Electronic Media and Technoculture , New Media: Digitextual Theories and Practices , and Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television .
Introduction: Production Studies: Roots and Routes, Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell. Part One: Histories of Media Production Studies. 1. Bringing the Social Back In: Studies of Production Cultures and Social Theory, Vicki Mayer . 2. Industry-Level Studies and the Contributions of Gitlin’s Inside Prime Time , Amanda Lotz 3. Leo C. Rosten's Hollywood: Power, Status, and the Primacy of Economic and Social Networks in Cultural Production, John L. Sullivan. 4. Privilege and Distinction in Production Worlds: Copyright, Collective Bargaining, and Working Conditions in Media Making, Matt Stahl . Part Two: Producers: Selves and Others. 5. Self-Serve Celebrity: The Production of Ordinariess and the Ordinariness of Production in Reality Television, Laura Grindstaff. 6. Feminism Below-the-Line: Defining Feminist Production Studies, Miranda J. Banks. 7. It's Not TV, It’s Brand Management TV: The Collective Author(s) of the Lost Franchise, Denise Mann. 8. Showrunning the Doctor Who Franchise: A Response to Denise Mann, Christine Cornea . Part Three: Production Spaces: Centers and Peripheries. 9. Liminal Places and Spaces: Public/Private Considerations, Candace Moore. 10. "Not in Kansas Anymore": Transnational Collaboration in Television Science Fiction Production, Jane Landman . 11. Crossing the Border: Studying Canadian Television Production, Elana Levine. 12. Borders of Production Research: A Response to Elana Levine, Serra Tinic . Part Four: Production as Lived Experience. 13. Studying Sideways: Ethnographic Access in Hollywood, Sherry Ortner. 14. Audience Knowledge and the Everyday Lives of Cultural Producers in Hollywood, Stephen Zafirau 15. Lights, Camera, but Where’s the Action? Actor-Network Theory and the Production of Robert Connolly's Three Dollars , Oli Mould . 16. Both Sides of the Fence: Blurred Distinctions in Scholarhip and Production (A Portfoloio of Interviews), John Caldwell . The Craft Association, Paul Malcolm . Hollywood Assistanting, Erin Hill . The Writer's Room, Felicia D. Henderson . Select Bibliography. List of Contributors. Index.
Who produces sound and music? And in what spaces, localities and contexts? As the production of sound and music in the 21st Century converges with multimedia, these questions are critically addressed ...in this new edited collection by Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates. Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound features 16 brand new articles by leading thinkers from the fields of music, audio engineering, anthropology and media. Innovative and timely, this collection represents scholars from around the world, revisiting established themes such as record production and the construction of genre with new perspectives, as well as exploring issues in cultural and virtual production.
In this letter, we address the problem of direction finding using coprime array, which is one of the most preferred sparse array configurations. Motivated by the fact that non-uniform element spacing ...hinders full utilization of the underlying information in the receive signals, we propose a direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation algorithm based on low-rank reconstruction of the Toeplitz covariance matrix. The atomic-norm representation of the measurements from the interpolated virtual array is considered, and the equivalent dual-variable rank minimization problem is formulated and solved using a cyclic optimization approach. The recovered covariance matrix enables the application of conventional subspace-based spectral estimation algorithms, such as MUSIC, to achieve enhanced DoA estimation performance. The estimation performance of the proposed approach, in terms of the degrees-of-freedom and spatial resolution, is examined. We also show the superiority of the proposed method over the competitive approaches in the root-mean-square error sense.
This article addresses the problem of joint direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation with nested bistatic multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar using tensor ...decomposition. We first employ the two-level nested transmit and receive arrays to develop the sum-difference coarray for constructing the Toeplitz and spatial smoothing matrices. We then generalize the three-way tensor model from DOD and DOA dimensions, and derive the optimized tensor by maximizing the number of detectable targets, where the existing COMFAC technique is exploited for angle estimation. We show that the proposed method can identify more targets and achieve better performance by enforcing the three-way structure information compared with the subspace-based algorithms. We also show that the conventional tensor model is just a special case. Finally, we derive the coarray Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB) for the nested MIMO radar, and also conduct a study for the conditions under which the CRB exists. Numerical simulations are provided to validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the performance improvement.
This Introduction is an exciting journey through the different styles of theatre that twentieth-century and contemporary directors have created. It discusses artistic and political values, rehearsal ...methods and the diverging relationships with actors, designers, other collaborators and audiences, and treatment of dramatic material. Offering a compelling analysis of theatrical practice, Christopher Innes and Maria Shevtsova explore the different rehearsal and staging principles and methods of such earlier groundbreaking figures as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Brecht, revising standard perspectives on their work. The authors analyse, as well, a diverse range of innovative contemporary directors, including Ariane Mnouchkine, Elizabeth LeCompte, Peter Sellars, Robert Wilson, Thomas Ostermeier and Oskaras Koršunovas, among many others. While tracing the different roots of directorial practices across time and space, and discussing their artistic, cultural and political significance, the authors provide key examples of the major directorial approaches and reveal comprehensive patterns in the craft of directing and the influence and collaborative relationships of directors.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production provides a detailed overview of current research on the production of mono and stereo recorded music. The handbook consists of 33 chapters, each written by ...leaders in the field of music production. Examining the technologies and places of music production as well the broad range of practices – organization, recording, desktop production, post-production and distribution – this edited collection looks at production as it has developed around the world. In addition, rather than isolating issues such as gender, race and sexuality in separate chapters, these points are threaded throughout the entire text.
InThe Long Take, Lutz Koepnick posits extended shot durations as a powerful medium for exploring different modes of perception and attention in our fast-paced world of mediated stimulations. ...Grounding his inquiry in the long takes of international filmmakers such as Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Abbas Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Michael Haneke, Koepnick reveals how their films evoke wondrous experiences of surprise, disruption, enchantment, and reorientation. He proceeds to show how the long take has come to thrive in diverse artistic practices across different media platforms: from the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto to the screen-based installations of Sophie Calle and Tacita Dean, from experimental work by Francis Alÿs and Janet Cardiff to durational images in contemporary video games.
Deeply informed by film and media theory, yet written in a fluid and often poetic style,The Long Takegoes far beyond recent writing about slow cinema. In Koepnick's account, the long take serves as a critical hallmark of international art cinema in the twenty-first century. It invites viewers to probe the aesthetics of moving images and to recalibrate their sense of time. Long takes unlock windows toward the new and unexpected amid the ever-mounting pressures of 24/7 self-management.
Lacking of adaptation to various array imperfections is an open problem for most high-precision direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation methods. Machine learning-based methods are data-driven, they do ...not rely on prior assumptions about array geometries, and are expected to adapt better to array imperfections when compared with model-based counterparts. This paper introduces a framework of the deep neural network to address the DOA estimation problem, so as to obtain good adaptation to array imperfections and enhanced generalization to unseen scenarios. The framework consists of a multitask autoencoder and a series of parallel multilayer classifiers. The autoencoder acts like a group of spatial filters, it decomposes the input into multiple components in different spatial subregions. These components thus have more concentrated distributions than the original input, which helps to reduce the burden of generalization for subsequent DOA estimation classifiers. The classifiers follow a one-versus-all classification guideline to determine if there are signal components near preseted directional grids, and the classification results are concatenated to reconstruct a spatial spectrum and estimate signal directions. Simulations are carried out to show that the proposed method performs satisfyingly in both generalization and imperfection adaptation.
Based on detailed onsite observation of documentary production, circulation practices and the analysis of film texts, this book identifies independence as a 'tactical practice', contesting the ...normative definitions and functions assigned to culture, cultural production and producers in a neoliberal economic system.
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