Film Production Commons^™

“Second Looks, Second Chances”: Collaborating With Lifers On A Video About Commutation Of Lwop Sentences, Regina Austin

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

In Pennsylvania, life means life without the possibility of parole (“LWOP”) or “death by incarceration.” Although executive commutation offers long serving rehabilitated lifers hope of release, in the past 20 years, only 8 commutations have been granted by the state’s governors. This article describes the collaboration between an organization of incarcerated persons serving LWOP and the law-school-based Penn Program on Documentaries and the Law that produced a video supporting increased commutations for Pennsylvania lifers. The article details the methodology of collaborative videomaking employed, the strategic decisions over content that were impacted by the politics of commutation, and the contributions ...

Mdocs Poster-Fall 2018, Course Offerings, Jesse Wakeman

MDOCS Publications

Fall 2018 Course Offerings:

Documentary Fundamentals:

• Documentary Storytelling
• Intro to Audio Documentary
• Documentary and Narrative Screenwriting

• Storytelling: Video
• Storytelling: Game Development
• Storytelling: Mapping

• The Artist Interview
• Festival Curation

The Revolution Of Plastic, Marine Brun-Franzetti

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

The Revolution Of Plastic is a fiction film about the overconsumption of plastic in our everyday lives. Leo, a ten year-old girl who loves dolphins, rebels against her father Mister Risso, the Manager of Detergents at Willy Supermarket.

Made Up: A Devised Short Film, Justine Musselman

Honors College Theses

I've explored and studied the use of devising in theatre, and decided to bring that process to the making of a short film. Devising is the process of an ensemble creating a piece together in a collaborative and creative environment. These devised works start without a final script and are formed through discussion, improvisation. and ensemble exercises. Film is a new medium for devising and allows for unlimited creative opportunity and exploration. My devised short film utilizes dramatic makeup as an artistic device to assist in the storytelling. The narrative focuses on the idea of how we present ourselves ...

Stray Cats, Christian P. Chesnut

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper details the making of Stray Cats, a University of New Orleans thesis film. It examines the process of creating the film in three parts. Part one will detail the pre-production, including the conceptualization, writing, and preparation for the project. Part two will cover the production, including the directing, production design, cinematography, and on-set operations. Part three will describe the post-production process, including the editing, color correction, sound design, and musical score. These three components will then be referenced in regards to the theme of the film, and will conclude by analyzing whether or not the final film achieves ...

The Archivettes, Megan D. Rossman

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

The Archivettes is a feature-length documentary film about the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the personal lives of the women involved in it. The film provides a comprehensive look at the history of the group, the materials it protects and the challenges arising as the founders face their final years.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives began in 1974, when a group of women involved in the Gay Academic Union realized that lesbian history was disappearing as quickly as it was being made (Edel). It is now home to the world's largest collection of materials by and about lesbians and their communities.

The Market, Claudia Zamora Valencia

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

The Market is a short science fiction essay film that explores ideas and values attached to the “local food” movement, and how they manifest themselves in the act of consumption at a farmers’ market in a gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

The Pond & The Sauna, Kaija Siirala

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

Combining interviews, observational footage, animation, archival images, video and film, The Pond & the Sauna examines the construction of home and family through an intergenerational collection of memories. Drawing on oral history traditions, the project traces the foundational threads that run through the lives of an extended family from past into the present. How do the values we learned as children manifest in our lives now? How do we negotiate our place within a wider social context? How are we moving through the cycles of life and what do home and family mean to us now?

Luncheon, Tomasz Gubernat

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

Documenting the apparently prosaic activities of nearly two hundred Polish immigrant senior citizens, “Luncheon” is an observational portrait of a place that seems foreign and significantly removed from its New York City surroundings. For this dwindling demographic, daily activities and commemorative performances provide a way to revivify collective memories and maintain individual identities that are still deeply connected to a place far removed in both space and time. “Luncheon” is an exploration of how memory and identity are constructed and maintained, nationality imagined, and communities preserved.

Instituting Protest (Film), Joshua Eisenberg

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

The road-trip story of one man looking at how first and fourteenth amendment rights have effected college campuses over time in the United States, while also looking at the possibility of revoking a diploma from a white nationalist for having different views than ones preferential to a certain college.

Observational Representation Of A Rural Chinese Family's Life: The Return, Lingyun Zheng

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

The Return is a 60-minute observational documentary film that follows a Chinese family's life story from 2013 to 2016.

The Moving Collage, Tian Leng

Publications and Research

Video is a medium based on space and time, and its forms and structures change how audience perceives and understand its content. This project will construct the interaction of videos in collage and explore the spiritual side of human experience with urban environment in New York City. Local museums and historical sites will be visited to understand the context of immigration history and culture.

High-definition video will be used to capture the imagery of several performers in field. The collage of shots, rather than the edit of them, provides a new perceptual experience for this medium. The structure of video ...

Moulins: Down The Arctic Drain, Jonathon Nugent Carlson

Theses and Dissertations

This observation-style nonfiction documentary film follows a National Science Foundation expedition to the Greenland ice sheet. The bivouac lasted for 25 continuous days. University of Arkansas Professor of Geosciences Matt Covington, Ph.D. teamed up with University of South Florida Professor Jason Gulley, Ph.D. to plan, propose, and ultimately accomplish the research goals of the expedition with the assistance of Ph.D. student Celia Trunz, M.S., and experienced expeditionary team member Vickie Siegel. As an observational-style documentary film, all scientific background information imparted herein is taken directly from interviews conducted with Professor Covington, to minimize opining.

The film ...

New Perspectives: Reno Street Art In Virtual Reality, Amy J. Hunsaker, Laura Rocke

Digital Initiatives Symposium

UNR Libraries’ Digital Initiatives Unit and Digital Media Technology Department partnered with an art historian, local art organizations, and Reno street artists to create an online archive, exhibit, and virtual reality experience highlighting the explosion of urban street art in Reno. The Libraries assembled a team that photographed the art using traditional 2D digital cameras, and captured 360 VR footage of the art and of several artists creating interior and exterior murals. The team conducted on-camera interviews of prominent street artists in Reno; collected permission forms; generated metadata; preserved the images and created an archive using CatDV, the Libraries’ media ...

Women In Film: A Personal Account, Carlie Merlo

Honors Projects

My Honors Project addresses the inequalities that exist within the film industry by sitting down with several senior members of the BGSU Film Department to discuss this issue. Research done by Dr. Martha Lauzen through the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film highlights the rampant sexism that currently exists in the entertainment industry. This subject is of particular concern for myself and for my female classmates who are preparing to make careers in the film field. After four years at BGSU, I have realized that the industry-wide sexism constantly discussed in the media does not exist ...

Crafting Fear: The Horror Film Trailer, Courtney Dreyer

Honors Theses

My research project investigates horror film trailers in an effort to define the characteristics of this genre and discuss its ideological implications. Focusing on theatrical trailers for American wide-release horror films between 2013 and 2017, I closely viewed a sample of forty trailers to inform my investigation. Horror trailers create an intense emotional experience of both dread and fear, tending to follow a similar narrative structure and employ a common set of stylistic techniques to achieve this emotional intensity. The shared stylistic techniques include elements such as tight framing, innocent imagery, and genre misdirection. The repetition of these elements promotes ...

Film Music And The Cinematic Experience, Brian Campbell

The Research and Scholarship Symposium

Ever since the invention of cinema, film producers have always played music with movies. The addition of quality music to a well-crafted film can change the feel of the entire film. Over its one hundred and thirty years of existence, cinema has evolved into an extremely diverse art form that addresses a wide array of subjects. Given all these factors, this paper explores how film music is extremely diverse and can be used in a wide variety of ways to enhance, affect, and contribute to the way we experience a film. It explores storytelling methods as a narrative device, mood ...

Peace Has No Borders, Denis H. Mueller Ph.D., Deb Ellis

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies

Film Screening and Q/A with co-directors:

During the Iraq War, veterans from the United States crossed the border to Canada seeking refuge from serving in what they viewed as an unjust and immoral war. Peace Has No Borders follows three resisters and their supporters through a ten-year effort to remain in Canada.

Peace Has No Borders takes place within the backdrop of a previous migration to Canada. Between 1965-1973, over 50,000 Americans crossed the border seeking refuge from what is now widely recognized as a misguided war. Forty years later, Canada faces the same political dilemma – whether to ...

The Reflection Of Sub Continental Primitive Archetype Mother In The Films Of Ritwik Ghatak, Zuairijah Mou

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies

Ritwik Ghatak is one of the significant Indian filmmakers in the Indian subcontinent. The touch of the culture of Bengal is clearly evident in the films of Ritwik Ghatak. Before analyzing the role of the primitive mother archetype in the scenes or in the development of the characters in his films, it is necessary to understand the origin of the primitive mother archetype.

The primitive mother archetype or maternal form is the statements, figure, myth, pattern, form, use etc. which has been existing in any culture for a long time. For example, the form of 'Mother' in Bengal is worshiped ...

Mdocs Poster-2018-04-02, Palestinian Voices: Lyd In Exile, Jesse Wakeman

MDOCS Publications

April 2, 6pm

Free and open to the public

Location: Somers Room

The Palestinian Voices series is organized and co-sponsored by the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS), the Environmental Studies and Sciences Program, International Affairs, Media and Film Studies, Art History, History, Hayat, and the Skidmore College Dean’s Office

Join us for a talk by Rami Younis and Sarah Friedland, and a screening of their work-in-progress documentary Lyd In Exile. Younis and Friedland have spent over three years researching and filming Lyd In Exile, and are in post-production. They will screen clips from their film and discuss ...