Screen production research: creative practice as a mode of enquiry (original) (raw)
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'Introduction: Practice and/as Media Industry Research'
Media Practice and Education, 2018
Media industry studies – an umbrella label that, according to Paul McDonald (2014), is given to ‘the whole body of research and of teaching that is principally concerned with wanting to critically examine the histories, processes, procedures, structures, policies, mechanisms, and professional ideologies that relate to the workings of the media industries’ – is now a focal point at many Universities. And it is not difficult to understand why: the principle ethos of media industry studies or media industry research is that, at its best, it promises the potential for rich dialogues between academia and industry, and between theory and practice. Media, communications and cultural studies (including the likes of film, television, publishing, radio, music and social media channels) are central to the pursuits of media industry research, with academics seeking to investigate and to theorise the industrial workings of these media. This might include their macro social, economic and political influences, their micro production cultures, distribution practices and professional ideologies, or any number of practice-related questions arising from the conditions of production under which media is informed (see, for example, Caldwell 2008; McDonald 2013; Freeman 2016). But while the study of media industries itself indicates a bridging between theory and practice – between the study of media forms and the pragmatics of media making – far less attention has been paid to what the study of media industries looks like as practice-based or practice-led research, or even how collaboration between academia and the media industries actively shapes practice. This themed Special Issue attempts to redress this particular gap, pushing forward the sub-field of media industry research via a more pronounced and emphatic emphasis on practice itself. It presents a selection of contributions from the ‘Practice and/as Media Industry Research’ symposium held at Bath Spa University in June 2017. The symposium intended to provide the opportunity for scholars and practitioners to focus on questions of practice and/as media industry research and aimed to showcase research that considered the complex relationships between the theoretical study of media industries and creative forms of media practice and practice-based media research. The overarching theme to emerge from the symposium was that there is a distinct academic community – whose research spans screen practices, collaborative practice, digital art practices, documentary practices, and so on – which encompasses a vibrant body of what can be broadly termed media industry research. While the symposium was particularly interested in showcasing research that had benefitted from collaboration between academics and the media industries, more specifically this Special Issue is interested in exploring, on the one hand, the ways in which media practice can be understood as media industry research, and, on the other hand, new insights into the nature of academia-industry collaboration, particularly with regards to implications for practice. The question, then, is what it means to extend the body of media industry research into areas and questions that more emphatically examine implications for practice. Put simply, and to paraphrase a methodological point made by Alex Nevill in his chapter, I argue that this means shifting the emphasis away from the study of media industries to learn about them, and instead towards studying with media industries to learn from them.
On the Edge Practice Reflections on filmmaking pedagogy in the age of the Creative Industries 1
This paper aims to reflect on film practice pedagogy and students' political agency, drawing on our experience of teaching for nearly a decade on the BA (Hons) Film Production course at the University of Portsmouth, as well as course leading and shaping curriculum for a period. The course at the University of Portsmouth is in many ways indicative of the wider context of filmmaking education in the UK. Its development could be seen as a direct corollary of the educational and cultural agenda and policies ushered in by the New Labour government in the early 2000s. This agenda was informed by an approach to Higher Education that placed it at the service of the economy and industry. HE institutions were encouraged to 'produce' graduates who would possess the skills to contribute to Britain's growing post-industrial knowledge economy (Duncan Petrie, 2012; Ramsey and White, 2015).Part of this agenda was the reframing of arts and media within an economic context, resulting in a terminology shift that labelled them as 'cultural industries' and later 'creative industries'. The new agenda of the Creative Industries was: " signalling a new and apparently seamless integration of culture and the market " (Duncan Petrie, 2012: 364.), entailing a realignment of the British film industry as a hub of skills and services catering for the global film market, and a new strategy for filmmaking education, led by the UK Film Council and Creative Skillset: an organization initially set up in the early 1990s to coordinate training across the film and television industries.The new film education strategy emphasized vocational training, skills development and links with the industry, noting bluntly that – " there is a clear distinction to be made between academic studies and vocational provision " (SkillSet/UK Film Council 2013: 17). As Petrie puts it, conspicuously absent from this agenda " is an acknowledgment, let alone discussion, of the importance of critical thinking to the propagation of creative, innovative, vibrant and socially relevant film and television production " (2012: 369).
Creative practice research in filmmaking and screen production
Studies in Australasian Cinema
This issue interrogates understandings of creative practice in screen production research within the framework of a broad range of activities that includes production and distribution of feature films to documentaries and to experimental audiovisual film genres. Screen production research here also includes enquiry into the education of future film and television professionals. The term 'screen' has been popular in Australia for the film and television industries, being adopted as early as 2004 with the creation of the Australian Screen Production, Education and Research Association (ASPERA) and the formation of Screen Australia in 2008. In the United Kingdom, the analogous term 'filmmaking' is widely employed. This special issue on Filmmaking and Screen Production Research is a joint project between ASPERA and the Filmmaking Research Network (FRN), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Creative Practice Research in Filmmaking and Screen Production is an anthology which highlights the ongoing work of the FRN and ASPERA, presented here as peer-reviewed research papers and a report, each interrogating issues that are central to both organisations' activities. ASPERA has been working with educators and researchers on consolidating screen production research particularly over the last five years in Australia. The ASPERA community has produced more than 50 scholarly traditional outputs since 2014 which have significantly contributed to new knowledge in the field. In addition, the 2017 ASPERA report Screen Production Research Reporting: An ASPERA Scoping Project captures disciplinary challenges regarding creative practice research reporting and evaluation in Australia's academic landscape. It seeks to assist researchers and research managers to understand how screen production outputs might be evaluated, and subsequently recognised as research outputs. The report highlights findings that environments for creative practice research vary greatly between institutions and outcomes of this mode of research vary greatly across the sector. The report also speaks of the extent to which these differences impact on the practices of screen production researchers. A number have changed their approach to conducting research, while others have found ways to comply with national requirements yet still work on creative practice projects that may not clearly sit within the 'research' parameters set by their institution. A second ASPERA report was released in June 2018. The Measuring Excellence in Screen Production Research report details how ASPERA as a peak body recognises and measures research quality in screen production. It offers guidelines and principles to assist creative practice researchers working in screen production and also those that evaluate this research, and aims to specify levels of excellence in the discipline for an Australian research context. It is intended to promote discussion and debate, anticipating amendments that respond to a community of researchers and evolving research and industry terrains. These reports are available on the ASPERA website
The cinematic mode of production: towards a political economy of the postmodern
Culture, Theory and Critique, 2003
Cinema marks a profound shift in the relation between image and text-indeed it is the watershed of the subjugation of language by image. Cinema as an innovative shift in both industrial capitalism and cultural practice marks, therefore, the restructuring of language function in accord with the changing protocols of techno-capitalism. The 'talking cure', otherwise known as psychoanalysis, is itself a symptom of cinema. As a precursor for TV and computing and Internet, cinema transacts value transfer across the image utilising a production process that can be grasped as founded under the rubric of what I call 'the attention theory of value'. The deterritorialised factory that is the contemporary image, is an essential component of globalisation, neo-imperialism, and militarisation, organising, as it were, the consent (ignorance of) and indeed desire for these latter processes. Thus 'cinema', as a paradigm for image-mediated social production, implies a cultural turn for political economics. It also implies that it is the interstitial, informal activities that transpire across the entire surface of the socius as well as in the vicissitudes of the psyche and experience that are the new (untheorised) production sites for global capital-and therefore among the significant sites for the waging of the next revolution. But all the story of the night told over, And their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancies images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable. (A Midsummer Night's Dream (the movie)) The Cinematic Mode of Production The term 'Cinematic Mode of Production' (CMP) suggests that cinema and its succeeding, if still simultaneous, formations, particularly television, video, computers and Internet, are deterritorialised factories in which spectators work, that is, in which they perform value-productive labour. In the cinematic image and its legacy, that gossamer imaginary arising out of a matrix of sociopsycho-material relations, we make our lives. This claim suggests that not only do we confront the image at the scene of the screen, but we confront the logistics of the image wherever we turn-imaginal functions are today
Bridging the Gap: towards a Dialogue between Screen Production, Policy and Scholarship
Reconceptualising Film Policies (eds Mingant and Tirtaine), 2017
Screen policy scholarship routinely draws attention to discrepancies between the stated aims of public policies and the concrete outcomes of those policies. Government reviews of such policies are likewise critiqued as being driven by political agendas that undermine their independence and limit their usefulness as a tool of meaningful policy reform. In light of these shortcomings, it might be hoped that independent scholarship would offer a more satisfactory alternative. Paradoxically though, it is the very independence of scholars from the political process that poses the biggest risk to government institutions and ensures that academics are kept at a considerable distance from the data that would elucidate the concrete practices of policy implementation. Furthermore, critical theorists have historically expressed an ambivalence about engaging with policy institutions. These two factors have created an inadequate articulation between policy and scholarship, which is contributing to a lack of understanding of how screen policies work on the ground. Drawing upon her detailed analysis of the Australian screen policy context, the author elaborates a conceptual model to explain the gap between policy and academia and argues for a renewed approach to screen policy analysis which, after Foucault, would privilege an examination of the micro-conditions of cultural practice.
Media Practice and Education, 2022
This article discusses the writing of an impact case study for REF2021 that revolves around independent film production, film industry and pedagogy. The culture of professional film production at Falmouth University's School of Film & Television resulted in involvement in the BAFTA winning Mark Jenkin film Bait (2019) and the widespread impact of that film provided the impetus for an impact case study that saw the consolidation in the form of the Sound/Image Cinema Lab (The Lab) project. Bait is one of several commercial short and feature film productions that have received interventions that have resulted in the production and/or completion of work that would not have been possible, or not possible to the same level of quality, without it. This article tracks how those interventions impacted beneficiaries and stakeholders culturally, socially and economically and resulted in national and regional economic and production benefits for film production and graduate career development. It discusses how these interventions and productions were configured as research to ensure that the impact of Bait and other films were measured and captured.