Anna Everett

John Thornton Caldwell

The rapid growth of new media technologies is radically changing film production and consumption. 'New Media' responds to these revolutionary developments to address topics such as computer games, digital animation techniques, media convergence, and internet audiences.

Theories and Practices of Digitextuality

New Media

Ethics? : stress, rifts, bad behavior -- Framework : spec, folds, leaks -- Regimes : craftworld, brandworld, specworld -- Case : warring creator pedagogies (the aspirant's crossover dilemma) -- Folding : stress aesthetics, compliance, deprivation pay -- Case : televisioning aspirant schemes -- Fracturing : rifts and stress-points as system self-portraits -- Case : conjuring micro-finance to overleverage aspirants -- Methods : production culture research design.

Folds, Faults, and Fractures in Embedded Creator Industries

Specworld

In Production Culture, John Thornton Caldwell investigates the cultural practices and belief systems of Los Angeles-based film and video production workers: not only those in prestigious positions such as producer and director but also many others, including gaffers, editors, and camera operators. Borrowing insights from cultural anthropology, Caldwell analyzes the stories workers tell and the rituals they enact to make sense of their labour and to critique the film and TV industry and the culture writ large. Far from being guarded, Hollywood executives and craftspeople work within an industry that obsessively reflects on itself and constantly exposes itself to the public. Caldwell suggests ways that scholarship might benefit by acknowledging the extent to which the industry first theorizes and critiques itself as part of economic and industrial habit. Caldwell's fieldwork combines interviews with industry workers; observations of sets and workplaces; and analyses of TV shows, industry documents, economic data, and promotional materials to show how film and video workers function in a radically transformed and unstable post-network industry. He chronicles how industry workers have responded to volatile changes including the convergence of "old" and "new" media; labour outsourcing; increasingly unruly labour and business relations; new production technologies; and multinational corporate conglomeration. He also explores new struggles over "authorship" within collective creative endeavours; the way that branding and syndication have become central business strategies for networks; and the "viral" use of industrial self-reflexivity to motivate consumers through DVD bonus tracks, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and "making-ofs." A significant, on-the-ground analysis of an industry in flux, Production Culture offers scholars new, more precise and holistic ways of thinking about media production as a cultural activity.

Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television

Production Culture

The collision of auteurism and rap--couched by primetime producers in the Northern Exposure script--was actually rather commonplace by the early 1990s. Series, and even news broadcasts, regularly engineered their narratives around highly coded aesthetic and cultural fragments, with a kind of ensemble iconography. Televisuality interrogates the nature of such performances as an historical phenomenon, an aesthetic and industrial practice, and as a socially symbolic act.

John Thornton Caldwell

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