Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Beyond The Mic: A Documentary Of Kaor’S Voices & History, Sydney M. Kolln

Honors Thesis

The University of South Dakota’s Media & Journalism Department celebrated the 40th anniversary of KAOR, the university’s student-run radio station, on Oct. 2, 2025. The celebration recognized generations of students whose creativity, leadership, and dedication contributed to the station’s growth and continued legacy on campus. This thesis explores the history and growth of KAOR through research, historical documents, and personal accounts from former and current KAOR students. By examining the station across multiple decades, the project highlights how student radio has adapted to changing technology and campus culture. This written thesis accompanies a 30-minute documentary focused on key eras in …

The Design Of Time: Envisioning The Future Through Science Fiction Production Design In The Alien Franchise, Josephine Spanier, Charles Howard

Honors Thesis

In filmmaking, the production designer works closely with the director and cinematographer to ensure cohesion and uniqueness in the film’s visual design. This collaboration often provides the designer with a strong degree of influence on the film’s final look, thus shaping the thematic and visual impact of a film on the audience. In highly stylized and fantastical genres, such as science fiction, production design plays an especially important role in creating worlds that may be entirely different from the one we currently live in, while still reflecting the real-world context in which the film was made. This phenomena can particularly …

Video Art In The Gallery Space, Juliet Wang, Matthew Thompson

Honors Thesis

The gallery space poses several challenges for incorporation of audiovisual or video elements, including offset entrances, lack of time investment, sound bleed, and light bleed. In order for an audiovisual work to be well optimized for the gallery space, ideally the artist should not only find ways around as many of these “challenges” as possible but also to embrace them and have the work be stronger because of these challenges.

Off The Beaten Path - A Podcast Interview Series, Shaun Holmes, Jason D'Mello

Honors Thesis

For my Honors Senior Thesis, I created a short podcast series entitled "Off The Beaten Path". My podcast delves into the lives of individuals who have who have been unafraid to grab life by the horns and choose a less traditional path in pursuit of bringing their passion or their own new creation to life. My interest in interviewing these types of individuals stems from my own life story, as well as my own desire to learn from the insights of people who have succeeded in these types of endeavors before me.

Representations Of Time In Time-Based Media: An Exploration Of The Human Experience Of Temporality In Film And Tv, Nelea Fong

Honors Thesis

Time is an aspect of the human experience that fascinates us but eludes our understanding. Humans have turned to science, philosophy, and theology in our endeavor to understand time, but our shared love and history of storytelling drives us to explore temporality through visual medias that have a structural foundation in time. Expanding our understanding of the human experience of time through time-based media such as movies and TV can point us toward comprehending various forms of time and how each person can perceive said time differently. Using film and TV theory, informed by scientific and philosophical explorations in the …

Self Hood And Self Realization In Contemporary Korean Dramas, Kevin Chang, Yanjie Wang

Honors Thesis

Korean dramas are an important worldwide cultural phenomenon; however, there has been a lack of direct critical analysis on contemporary Korean dramas. Significantly, popular media is a potent tool to understand a country’s societal values. Given Korea’s intellectual contact with the West, it is possible to interpret K-dramas through the lens of self-realization. It’s Okay to Not be Okay teaches us that trauma must be faced to overcome it though the stories of Moon Gang-tae, Sang-tae, and Ko Moon-young. In Extracurricular, Jisoo and Gyuri represent how the current youth environment of South Korea stifles self-expression and self-realization. Itaewon Class, …

Explorations Of Liminality And Intersectionality In Tabletop Games, Alyna Kim

Honors Thesis

In fantasy role-playing games (RPGs), especially tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), participants are required to collaborate to create not only fantasy personas in the shape of characters, but also the world and space that makes up the game itself. Participants therefore create a sense of both time and space that exist outside of basic reality. The created space and time––referred to as a world or a story––exists as a liminal space that participants and characters use as a tool to both exist and explore. While the participants exist physically in the real world, the game space allows them to go beyond …

Exploring The Romantic Comedy: From The 90s To Today, Abigail Sherlock

Honors Thesis

The genre of the romantic comedy has been around for as long as humans have been telling stories. Love, a uniquely human experience, is something we don’t fully understand, which can make for great storytelling fodder. The first popular romantic comedies were Shakespearian comedies, built around the idea of two people meeting and quickly running into a roadblock (or a number of roadblocks) that keeps them apart. This main idea, of following the story of two character’s relationship, has been a staple of storytelling for centuries. We have seen these tropes in Shakespeare, in novels from the likes of Jane …

Free Views To Pay Per Views, Andrew York

Honors Thesis

The purpose of this research was to analyze three different narrative web series that were adapted into traditional television formats within the past ten years. Delving into how the creators marketed themselves, created the content, and distributed the content allows the reader to notice strategies that worked in the past to sell stories to production companies.

Anime: Fortress Of Solitude Or Kryptonite?, Oscar King Iv

Honors Thesis

Anime is a complex medium that is expanding at a rapid rate on a global scale. It inspires fandoms, some of which unbelievably tenacious. My research explored scholarship concerning anime fans and asked the question: Why does anime in particular seem to create hyper-obsessed fans? I consulted fandom studies, pop culture scholarship, and sources regarding the anime medium as a whole.

The results of my study suggested that anime, at its extremes, functions in some capacity as a modern fairy tale genre. It allows a viewer to vicariously experience life through the screen, engaging with the animated characters in a …