Paths to the Pantheon: Using the Education of Successful Filmmakers to Shape Film Education

This paper analyses the education of filmmakers throughout film history to ascertain the impact of film education on the development of filmmakers and to highlight the diverse educational backgrounds of successful filmmakers. The focus is on practitioners who have found success in both critical and commercial arenas. This collation of existing yet disparate data and its subsequent analysis has been undertaken to introduce different areas into consideration in the film education debate. Data analysis was undertaken to ascertain if any trends could be found regarding the idea that higher education has a role to play in filmmaker development and whether this idea is worthy of further analysis. It is clear that film education has had an impact on the development of filmmakers over the period that film studio and television broadcast training has decreased and suggests that current disconnections between academia and film industry can be addressed. Also, the sheer diversity of educational backgrounds points to the potential development of a more diverse film education. This paper projects what such a film education might look like based on analysis of data that includes a wealth of international filmmakers from all periods of film history to date alongside a deeper discussion of the validity and possibility of constructing a film education that reflects historical industrial trends and takes the experiences and voices of successful filmmakers as the starting point for the debate

Reef In St. Ives

Reef are a band who had commercial success in the 1990's and have continued to work primarily as a live act since then. In 2015 they performed two live concerts in The Guildhall St. Ives, this was filmed and recorded for release as a live album. The band wanted a small choir to support the performances and through a connection with Rick Rogers, Andrea Rushton took on the task of selecting a group of singers, arranging and teaching them them parts. Los Angeles based producer George Drakoulias worked with the band and choir on this project over the two days spent in St. Ives

Collaborative arts based learning using Canvas

Digital technologies have a central and continuing role to play in the future of learning, competing models of education are prompting institutions to evaluate how they facilitate taught content and adapt to new technologies (NMC, 2015). Technology has the ability to disrupt and empower, to captivate and deviate, as do the learners themselves. This session will focus on the use of Canvas LMS, new to Falmouth University, to facilitate performance based distance learning. Harnessing the power of the crowd is central to student experience, particularly in relation to online environments where the physical convening of students is not possible. Computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) can be used to facilitate conversation, aid assessment and provide valuable feedback in an online environment. Focusing on the benefits of CSCL, we have implemented an environment for a fully online transnational degree launched in the 2014/15 academic year. The Canvas platform was chosen as an alternative learning environment (not widely used in UK Higher Education) that facilitates user interaction, collaboration and discussion. There is a requirement from creative arts students that they are able to upload work in various digital forms; electronic submission and feedback of work should utilise available technologies. It has been demonstrated that cooperative learning is beneficial (Johnson, Johnson & Stanne, 2000), we need to find methods to enable collaboration in a way that is digitally accessible for students. The approach implemented in Canvas for performance based courses is suggested as one method to facilitate collaboration. This session will address the main conference theme “Harnessing the power of the crowd” by detailing the introduction and implementation of a fully distant learning initiative using Canvas as an online platform to facilitate collaborative arts based learning. Participants can expect to hear how the environment has handled functionality fundamental to performance based courses; including audio and visual submissions and peer review. This is an anecdotal take on the Canvas environment from an educational technology team who have developed and supported its use for new distance courses, and as such would be of benefit to others thinking of using the Canvas platform. Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., & Stanne, M. E., 2000. Cooperative learning methods: A meta-analysis. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (NMC) New Media Consortium, 2015. The NMC Horizon Report :: 2015 Higher Education Edition. [online] Available at: [Accessed 25 February 2015]

‘Every brew is a challenge and every glass of a good beer is an achievement’: home brewing and serious leisure

This exploratory study contributes to the body of knowledge of leisure research, investigating various dimensions related to home brewing, particularly reasons for and benefits from engaging in this activity through the lens of the Serious Leisure Construct (SLC). Although evidence suggests that home brewing has increased in popularity, to date, it has received limited attention from the academic literature. The study is based on the responses of 219 home brewers in Australia. The employed content analysis and word association identified the feeling of a rewarding and enjoying experience, affordability, sharing, brewing-to-taste, and socialising opportunities as key perceived benefits. In addition, various links between the findings and the SLC were identified. Overall, the findings revealing the seemingly multifaceted nature of home brewing, which combines tangible elements such as producing the craft beer, and intangible, for instance, sharing and socialising, highlight important theoretical and practical implications for leisure involvement. © 2017 Canadian Association for Leisure Studies / Association canadienne d’études en loisi

To Intercession

To Intercession was made as part of a larger project of artistic research undertaken by David Prior and Frances Crow, which address the changing role of bells in contemporary culture. This work extends the theme with a particular focus on the dual role bells have played in defining territory and interceding between humans and God. Just as prayers are often inscribed into the metal of bells, casting them to heaven when played, so too were bells understood by the early church to represent the voice of God. In To Intercession the voices of the women interviewed by Binaural/ Nodar are transmuted into bell tones, which are then played through four tiny speakers mounted on brass rods – tiny transducers, mediating one kind of energy into another. To Intercession takes its physical form from the networks of megaphones found in the Parish of Sul, where the project began, that play recordings of bells to mark the passing of time and to amplify the voice of the priest during Mass. The piece represents these megaphones in miniature and in so doing; the listener becomes engaged in the intimate lives of the women who make up Sul’s church congregation. To Intercession was commissioned by Binaural/Nodar for the Viseu Rural 2.0 Collective Exhibition at Casa das Memórias (Viseu, Portugal) from 28 November 2015 – 17 April 2016. The exhibition was part of the Visue Rural 2.0 project Documenting and [Re]expressing Rural Heritage and as invited artists we were asked to respond to the archive of recordings and videos that have been collected as part of the Viseu Rural 2.0 project

Four Frames: The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

Feature article on the film The Royal Tenenbaums

Insiders

Rumors persist that the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey is based on the work of Californian artist Jan Check. At an event organised to celebrate the artist’s life a technician sheds light on the problems involved in fabricating Check’s work. The suggested link with Kubrick’s film is revealed to be more plausible than previously thought. The story is told of a 17th Century physician and his experiment into the question of consciousness carried out on a head in the moments after a convicted man’s execution by guillotine. A new embellishment of the story is proposed in which the assumed blank expression of death turns out instead to be a stealthy communication built, somehow, into non-signifying gestures of the face. This piece is organised as two texts in parallel. In both cases they are factual accounts compounded by fiction. The piece approaches the theme of the Interior obliquely, as the not-stated concern of (un)related narratives. Both parts of the text are written in a concise and direct style allowing the registers of their engagement with the Interior to remain distinct. The challenge for the reader is to find the theme in implicit relations; the piece performs the complication of interior and exterior addressed also on the level of content

(Ir)rational Actors and the Politics of Unseeing

China Mieville's novel The City & the City offers a vision of two overlapping, interpenetrating city-states: Ul Qoma and Besźel. Residents of one city are, by law, unable to see or interact with people in the other - even if they are physically next to each other but on the opposite side of the border. The experience presented in this book mimics the experience of being a gay man in the 1980s and 1990s, the worst of the AIDS years, when to be queer was to be seen and unseen at the same time. I argue that it is better to resist power structures that rest upon the politics of unseeing

Game-Playing-Role

This thesis explores the ways in which suspension of disbelief works in digital games. Primarily concerned with how players relate imaginatively to the often major dissonance between gameplay and narrative in digital games, this thesis questions how the literate players of games reconcile these complex texts imaginatively. Proposing that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of suspension of disbelief is a complicated process often cited rhetorically rather than given its theoretical due, this thesis aims to rehabilitate the term and turn it into a useful, sharpened tool for games studies. Digital games themselves are also seen to be an intense new realm of possibilities for the suspension of disbelief, and textual analysis of games which approach the fourth wall or the suspension of disbelief on their own terms helps to make this clear. Beginning by defining the differences of games compared to other media, the thesis goes on to define suspension of disbelief in both its historical and modern contexts and see how it fits with games, isolating three key problems with uniting the concept with the medium. The three chapters which follow looked in more depth at the problems of the skilled reader, fundamental activity and dissonance through investigations into games’ textual construction, the mindsets they engender in players and their reformulation of the fourth wall. The final section looks at the conclusions working together to achieve the dual aims of proposing a new model for game reading which centres around a willed disavowal of presence on the part of the gamer combined with the gamer's taking up of a role offered by the game-text, and rehabilitating both the term and the concept of suspension of disbelief

Reflections on reflexivity and ethics for relational design and relational design pedagogy

Over the last decade, the global field of communication design, and design education in particular, has become increasingly pre-occupied with the notion of ‘relational design’ (Service Design, Design for Social Change, Design for Social Innovation etc.) and its potential to intervene in ‘real-world’ issues. However, while these practices have borrowed easily from research methodologies traditionally associated with social sciences, including emancipatory research and action research, there has been little recognition of their associated ethical rigour of practice. Using a transdisciplinary approach, this paper draws on social work theory, education and practice to contemplate the use of reflexivity as a potentially generative framework for addressing the various complex ethical problematics associated with relational design research and practice