Media Industries Project

04/20/2016

Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges worke…

07/20/2015

The Spring 2015 edition of From the Field is now live! This edition features articles on media policy, transnational television, and localized labor practices, in addition to many other recent articles by leading media industries scholars.

The Spring 2015 From the Field edition features articles on media policy, transnational television, and localized labor practices, in addition to many other recent articles by leading media industries scholars.

05/22/2015

Make sure to give the first peer reviewed issue of Media Industries a read!! It covers a broad media industries landscape and features the following scholars and essays:

Stuart Cunningham and Terry Flew - "Reconsidering Media Economics: From Orthodoxies to Heterodoxies"
Sergio Sparviero - "Hollywood Creative Accounting: The Success Rate of Major Motion Pictures"
Danny Kimball - "Sponsored Data and Net Neutrality: Exemption and Discrimination in the Mobile Broadband Industry"
Myles McNutt - "Mobile Production: Spatialized Labor, Location Professionals, and the Expanding Geography of Television Production"
Colleen Montgomery - "Cartoon Wasteland: Remediating and Recommodifying Archival Media in Disney’s Epic Mickey"

As you enjoy these essays, note that the journal is still accepting submissions for our second issue of Volume 2!
http://www.mediaindustriesjournal.org/

05/22/2015

Issue 2.1 of the Media Industries journal is now live. This is the first peer-reviewed issue, with several members of the MIP team serving as the editors. Check it out below.

Media Industries is an open-access peer reviewed journal supporting the critical study of media industries worldwide.

05/08/2015

We're seeking qualified candidates for the Research Director position at the Media Industries Project. Please distribute the following job post amongst friends and colleagues.

https://recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/apply/JPF00471

University of California Santa Barbara Online Faculty Recruitment

04/02/2015

Our interview with VFX artist Dave Rand takes you inside Rhythm & Hues (Life of Pi) during its final days--a rare, personal account of Southern California's dwindling VFX industry.

http://www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/mip/article/interview-dave-rand

Dave Rand is a visual effects artist and activist with stints at some of the most recognizable firms in the business, including Disney, Rhythm & Hues, Sony ImageWorks, and Digital Domain. His film credits aren’t too shabby either: Frozen, Life of Pi, Transformers 3, and Journey to the Center of the…

03/31/2015

In case you missed it during SCMS, catch up on our Winter 2015 edition of From the Field, featuring work on historical media industry studies, crowdfunding, and media distribution!

The Winter 2015 edition of From the Field features the third inaugural issue of the Media Industries Journal, articles on the future of fan-ancing, and a special issue of Velvet Light Trap on media distribution.

02/19/2015

Our latest Bookshelf highlights Arlene Davila and Yeidy M. Rivero’s new collection Contemporary Latina/o Media, which grapples with the shifting industrial formations, audience configurations, and labor practices in the transnational Latina/o media sphere—issues pertinent to media industry studies writ large.

Given that most scholarly work on Latino media tends towards analyses of representations, the collection Contemporary Latina/o Media seeks to redress this emphasis by looking behind the scenes at changing industrial formations as well as their effects on media labor and audiences. As editors Arlene…

02/12/2015

In our latest Buzz, we explain the recent job cuts at DreamWorks Animation as a symptom of the studio’s ongoing financial struggles and its inability to reshape creative operations at a time of industry-wide economic uncertainty.

On January 22, DreamWorks Animation (DWA) announced that it would close its PDI/DreamWorks studio in Redwood City, California, effective immediately. DWA will eliminate approximately 500 jobs, or about 20 percent of its workforce, including animators, storyboard artists, and support staff. These lay…

02/11/2015

What is a network in the post-network era? Aymar Jean Christian maps the diverse business strategies of web television, from streaming video-on-demand sites to DIY productions, in the most recent Things to Know.

http://www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/mip/article/web-tv-networks-challenge-linear-business-models

Most people find web TV – television programming served exclusively via Internet protocols – hard to grasp. Typically it’s because they have not considered how “networks” function differently outside the legacy cable system.

02/03/2015

Steve Kaplan from the Animation Guild discusses the challenges he confronts trying to organize visual effects artists in our latest Critical Conversations.

Steve Kaplan worked for years as a visual effects artist on feature films, TV shows, and commercials. He then joined The Animation Guild [Local 839] in 2010 to help organize the animation and visual effects fields. He has been instrumental in reaching out to members working in non-union studios as w…

01/28/2015

In our most recent Things to Know, Derek Kompare critically examines how the art and culture of comics function industrially—from their origins as a distinctive subculture to their more recent mainstream success at the box office.

While Hollywood has been releasing adaptations of characters and stories that originated in comic books for many years, 2014 has seen the volume of this stream increase to a torrent. Two studios dominate this space at the moment, due to their corporate relationships with the two major comics publish…