Film Production Commons^™

Dancing In The Digital Age: How Social Media Shapes The Commercial Dance Industry, Luke Lisowski

Honors College Theses

Social media has fundamentally transformed the commercial dance industry, reshaping how dancers establish careers, connect with industry professionals, and promote their artistry. This thesis examines the impact of social media platforms – such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube – on career growth by facilitating networking opportunities, increasing visibility, and redefining industry standards. The research explores how digital platforms have shifted the traditional pathways to success, enabling dancers to showcase their work independently while also creating challenges related to self-promotion, competition, and mental health.

Through a series of in-depth interviews with professional dancers and choreographers actively working in the industry, this …

At The Outset: An Exploration Of Jazz And The Music Video, Riley Kramer

Honors Projects

This project centers around the creation of an original jazz composition and music video for the purpose of filling the gap in visual media used to promote jazz music. The history of music in film is briefly explored, as well as the history of jazz in film and music videos. Jazz is found to have been intertwined with film from the first widely available sound films, but the connection has since dwindled, with only a few modern jazz compositions having widely available music videos.

An original jazz tune, “At the Outset,” was created for this project. The details of the …

Social Imagining In “Youth Taking Action:” Documenting Immigrating And Settling Through A Hybrid Youth Participatory Action Research Project, Natacha Monestel Mora, Julia Iriarte, Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur, Sediqa Temori, Mathias Abraha

Occasional Paper Series

This paper is a memoir of our experiences with Youth Taking Action (YTA), a YPAR program that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. YTA, a collaborative effort organized by a non-profit based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, provided a space for 6 newcomer youths and 4 immigrant adults to engage in active dialogue. Through these conversations, we explored stories of immigration and settlement, identified barriers that limit opportunities for young newcomers and discussed possible actions to address these issues. The youth also learned documentary filmmaking techniques, which helped them collect data and generate more dialogue. This process revealed that linguistic …

Painting Stories And Filming Change, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Contributions to Books

Mithila Art has helped illuminate various aspects of the relationship between gendered Maithil social roles and Maithil women’s narratives in connection with a feminist participatory action research project conducted primarily in 2016-2017 in and around the northern Bihari town of Madhubani. While participatory action research philosophically and methodologically attends to process as much as product, Mithila Art played a role in the process and product of making a documentary film and in our capacity to understand and communicate with varied audiences about shifting Maithil gender norms. The research and filmic project provided insight into the complex relationship among the stories …

Sports For Gender Equality, Michelle Salmeron, Julia Mott, Eliza Cash

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Recent studies show that participating in sports leads to lower levels of anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity in children while also fostering higher self-esteem (Tahira, 2023). In Mexico, 67% of girls are inactive (Provoking Sport, 2023). However, there has been little direct research conducted in Mexico to illustrate and exemplify the benefits of sports for girls and women. Additionally, there are few role models for them to look up to who share their cultural background, as most examples come from other countries. This creates a cycle that hinders cultural and societal growth, as well as creates a barrier to sports participation. …

Trespassers Of Space: Rewriting Female Narratives In Mexican Cinema, Andrea Ruvalcaba

Undergraduate Theses in Art History

How have Mexican cultural figures such as Maria Novaro and Adela Sequeyo made space for themselves in the male-dominated film realm? How and why have these women dared to become “contrabandistas,” or trespassers, in a social fabric defined and governed by men? The same questions apply to the world of Mexican cinema — more specifically Mexican Feminist cinema. Throughout these pages, I will explore how the film Los Pasos de Ana (1991), by the Mexican filmmaker Marysa Sistach, integrates women’s perspectives into Mexican film culture to counteract the neutralization of powerful female representations played out across various facets of Mexican …

Towards Active Learning Practice: A Theory To Practice-Led Model. Part 1: Principles Of Student-Centred Learning, Strutts Psyridis

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This monograph explores Active Learning as a student-centred pedagogical model that bridges theory and practice in screen education. It examines constructivist approaches, metacognition, and situated learning, arguing for performative, embodied teaching methods. The paper highlights tensions between traditional instruction and experiential learning, proposing adaptable frameworks for enhancing engagement, autonomy, and transferable skills.

Towards Active Learning Practice: A Theory To Practice-Led Model. Part 3: Engagement, Motivation And Classroom Management, Strutts Psyridis

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

Part 3 of this continuing series on Active Learning examines engagement, motivation, and classroom management within active learning environments, arguing that meaningful engagement is performative, designed, and context-dependent. Drawing on creative industries, intrinsic motivation theory, flipped classroom models, and digital pedagogies, it proposes that effective teaching integrates facilitation, structure, and adaptive strategies to sustain learner agency, participation, and deep learning.

Student Planners, City Futures: A Crp Documentary, Natalie Kate Venable

City and Regional Planning

Student Planners, City Futures, is a documentary following Professor Dave Amos and 22 students as they prepare a draft of Grover Beach’s General Plan Circulation Element update. Students in their final year in Cal Poly’s City & Regional Planning program take CRP410 – Community Planning Lab I and CRP 411 – Community Planning Lab II during fall and winter quarter as their capstone planning studio. Each studio completes a different project each year. For the 2024-2025 school year, Professor Amos’s section was tasked with completing a General Plan Circulation Element update for the City of Grover Beach. The film …

Video Poem: What Remains, Edie Steiner

The Goose

What Remainsis a three-minute poetry film I created to address the issue of “becoming-with” (Wright 2014). In the film, I document two large-scale, public-art spectacles I witnessed in Toronto, as historical markers of collective becoming-with. I contrast super-8mm film footage of the 1984 outdoor public performance “Shibola” at the Bell Trinity Square building in Toronto, by the Japanese Butoh dance group Sankai Juku, with digital video of “A Tribute to Toronto,” Judy Chicago’s 2022 Smoke Sculpture on the Toronto waterfront. I then intercut these images with digital recordings of ruins and relics, both ancient and modern, merging as …

Towards The Non-Spectacle: Responses To Necropolitics In The Artwork Of Teresa Margolles And Maya Watanabe, Leslie Anne Condon

Masters Theses

How do we engage with artwork that addresses complicated histories

of colonialism and political violence, specifically intangible and

incomprehensible violence? Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’ 2005 work, Lote

Bravo, is named after and composed of the soil from a mass grave site

discovered in 1995 in the southeastern corner of Ciudad Juárez, a city known

internationally for the femicide that has continued to haunt its streets and

peripheries since the 1990s. Peruvian filmmaker Maya Watanabe’s 2019 film

Liminal cinematically documents the official exhumation of two mass graves

in the Ayacucho and Huánuco regions of the Andes highlands, where

thousands of …

You Get That From Me, Robyn Duncan

Theses and Dissertations

You Get That From Me is a mixed-media, collage-based film that integrates personal portraits, allegorical maps, and digital collages with spoken narration to craft a stylistic memoir of a pivotal period in my life: the transition from childhood to motherhood.

Burn, Deborah Rolf

Theses and Dissertations

Burn is a hybrid documentary that explores the collective experience of being “burned out” through interviews and lumen photography. Burnout is a syndrome associated with improperly managed workplace stress. Lumen printing is an alternative photographic process where photographic paper is exposed to daylight.

Teaching Documentary Filmmaking As Social Advocacy: The Case Of The Yangon Film School, Violet Valdez, Mon Mon Myat

Department of Communication Faculty Publications

This is a descriptive case study of Yangon Film School (Yangon, Myanmar) in a setting of protracted civil conflict that has persisted since 1968. It examined the school’s approach in the teaching of documentary filmmaking and analyzed key aspects of the school’s operations. Findings show that the documentary filmmaking taught in the school was informed by social advocacy. This was fostered through the students’ participation in films commissioned to the school by civil society organizations and the practice of participatory filmmaking. The school stood out in the Myanmar setting for its dual character as a training center and a production …

Personification: A Short Film, Charles R. Adams

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Personification follows a group of college students as they receive news that mysterious shape-shifting creatures are posing as humans. They quickly turn on each other, realizing there is no one they can trust. In the style of mid-20th - century horror films, notably Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the short film explores themes of paranoia and the value of human expression in a time when generative AI seeks to replace the creative method. In keeping with this theme, the emphasis for this project was on the act of creation. Pre-production—which included scriptwriting, casting, and various organizational tasks—ran …

A Guide To Creating Trans And Gender Variant Inclusive Film Sets: For Directors And Department Heads On Non-Union/Low Budget Film Sets, Perce Alvarez

CMC Senior Theses

The following thesis explores transgender and gender-variant inclusivity practices in film production. It conducts an overview of information on lgbtq+ and transgender populations, discrimination, and filmmaking practices. From there, a baseline of definitions for terms and worldviews adopted by transgender and gender-variant communities is established. Primarily, this thesis focuses on establishing reasoning for and presenting practical applications of transgender inclusivity that can be implemented throughout the film production process. It accomplishes this by focusing on specific parts of the production process and how the leaders of those subprocesses can put these inclusivity practices into action.

Reckoning With The Cowboy: Justice, Trauma, And The Myth Of Freedom In Be The Cowboy, Abbie Oh Arroyo

Scripps Senior Theses

Be the Cowboy interrogates the romanticized myth of the cowboy as a symbol of justice and freedom through the lens of racialized and gendered trauma. Centered on two Korean American sisters, the film explores the aftermath of a sexual assault and the ensuing quest for justice, highlighting the emotional and ethical tensions between retribution and healing. Drawing from postcolonial, trauma, and feminist theory, the project critiques the cowboy archetype’s historical entwinement with white patriarchy, colonial violence, and the aestheticization of marginalized suffering. By reimagining the Western genre through a racialized and gendered perspective, Be the Cowboy challenges dominant cultural narratives …

Cashing In Or Giving Back: The Role Of Film Tax Incentives In The Cultural Impact Of Runaway Productions, Karolina Krok

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the internationalization of Hollywood through economic and creative runaway productions driven by international tax incentives. It examines how these incentives can impact not only the commercial but the cultural success of productions filmed abroad, focusing on regions such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, California, New York, and New Jersey. The analysis centers on cultural tests and diversity requirements, revealing two main approaches: the first requires a minimum of diversity standards and cultural tests points to be met, while the second prioritizes and rewards productions with the highest achieved assessment of those. Furthermore, …

'God Loves The World' Documentary, Ilona Kitchen

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The internet is a powerful place. People feel that they can share how they feel with no consequences. Hedviga Tkáčová (2021) argues that negative media portrayals of Christianity contribute to prejudice against Christian university students in Slovakia, which undermines social cohesion and highlights the need for greater support of religious diversity. From memes to viral videos, these digital interactions can feel like a personal attack, exposing how online spaces can betray the trust and faith of the Roman Catholic Church. As a Roman Catholic, I frequently encounter such issues when engaging with content in the media. In public settings, it …

East Of The Sun, West Of The Moon Film Pitch Deck, Micah Anderson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

A pitch deck to present an idea for a film adaptation of the fairy tale "East of the Sun and West of the Moon." The deliverables include a 3-5 minute animatic of a single scene (complete with placeholder audio), the script of the scene, storyboards used to map out each action, at least one model sheet for each major character, and rough sketches of all 30 characters. They are to be presented in an exhibition with the animatic on loop on a TV, a public presentation in the Myers auditorium, and a written paper on the details regarding the medium …