Coordinating over time: The micro-processes of integrating creativity and control in a dramatic television production

The pressures of continuous innovation in response to shorter product lifecycles and changing customer tastes or requirements create a constant challenge for firms expected to deliver predictable growth. Yet, the creativity needed for new product development projects often emerges in unpredictable and non-linear ways. Projects such as software development, new drug exploration, and filmmaking are knowledge-intensive undertakings where creativity is not confined to the conceptual stage of the project, but required for its duration. Different groups are often involved at different stages of the project and their creative contributions need to be conjunctive. Consequently, formal controls are required to coordinate their creative inputs. My research explores how the competing tensions of creativity and control are balanced through coordinating mechanisms over time in large-scale creative collaborations (LSCCs). Given the long implicit function of the budget as a coordinating mechanism, it became the focal point of this exploration. My dissertation is focused on answering two related research questions. First, how are budgets used to accomplished coordination over time? Second, how are budgets used to mediate the tensions between creativity and control? In this study, I used a qualitative approach to build new theory. My enquiry is situated in the film and television industry where creative aspirations must be continually balanced within the parameters of time and money. Using an in-depth, single case study design, I studied the coordinating practices of the crew of a dramatic television series production in ‘real time’ as they created and produced each script of the season. In the film and television industry, each product is a new creation that comes to fruition through the collaborative efforts of teams of artists, designers and specialized crafts people

Prepare to Pivot: Shifting from the projection surface to the Zoom screen necessitated by global pandemic

Design for theatre is an endeavor in which the physical, the corporeal, the defined, is applied to an ephemeral artform, one meant to happen only in the moment and then fade away. As such, building the world of the theatrical space, whether physical or digital, is similar to shooting at a moving target. While one angle of approach may be perfect for a moment, being ready and flexible enough to pivot, whether to reimagine due to limitation or to adjust an entire project due to calamity, like the shift from in person to online streaming. This paper investigates the joy of research, the growing pains of development, and then the labor of reshaping and rebuilding a projection design when the Covid-19 pandemic forced a rethinking of live performance. Chapter 1 explores the excitement that comes from diving into the exploration of first concepts of design, with the beginner’s mind engaged. Chapter 2 is a discussion of virtual filmmaking and how the game building software Unreal Engine is being utilized in the film world, as well as how these relate to theatre. Chapter 3 takes us on the ride of The Pivot as a pandemic forces changes in scripts and platforms. Chapter 4 deals with the balance of choices in design elements as they relate to projection in a live space versus the Zoom live stream, specifically, motion/stillness and geography building in a 2D platform. Finally, by maintaining a level of flexibility in design and approach, the pivot allows for new outcomes and unexpected discoveries

Media Effectiveness Training

An analysis of the Tolt Junior-Senior High School faculty\u27s use of instructional media showed a need for a program designed to increase the effective use of the Learning Resource Center\u27s available media. This project consisted of developing a series of inservice classes designed to train the teachers to better utilize the overhead, opaque, slide, filmstrip, and 16mm projectors, tape recorders, VTR, microfiche reader/printer, and dry mount press. Appropriate examples have been produced in each medium and a tool created for the evaluation of the inservice program

Evaluating Copyright Protection in the Data-Driven Era: Centering on Motion Picture\u27s Past and Future

Since the 1910s, Hollywood has measured audience preferences with rough industry-created methods. In the 1940s, scientific audience research led by George Gallup started to conduct film audience surveys with traditional statistical and psychological methods. However, the quantity, quality, and speed were limited. Things dramatically changed in the internet age. The prevalence of digital data increases the instantaneousness, convenience, width, and depth of collecting audience and content data. Advanced data and AI technologies have also allowed machines to provide filmmakers with ideas or even make human-like expressions. This brings new copyright challenges in the data-driven era. Massive amounts of text and data are the premise of text and data mining (TDM), as well as the admission ticket to access machine learning technologies. Given the high and uncertain copyright violation risks in the data-driven creation process, whoever controls the copyrighted film materials can monopolize the data and AI technologies to create motion pictures in the data-driven era. Considering that copyright shall not be the gatekeeper to new technological uses that do not impair the original uses of copyrighted works in the existing markets, this study proposes to create a TDM and model training limitations or exceptions to copyrights and recommends the Singapore legislative model. Motion pictures, as public entertainment media, have inherently limited creative choices. Identifying data-driven works’ human original expression components is also challenging. This study proposes establishing a voluntarily negotiated license institution backed up by a compulsory license to enable other filmmakers to reuse film materials in new motion pictures. The film material’s degree of human original authorship certified by film artists’ guilds shall be a crucial factor in deciding the compulsory license’s royalty rate and terms to encourage retaining human artists. This study argues that international and domestic policymakers should enjoy broad discretion to qualify data-driven work’s copyright protection because data-driven work is a new category of work. It would be too late to wait until ubiquitous data-driven works block human creative freedom and floods of data-driven work copyright litigations overwhelm the judicial systems

2016-2017 Course Catalog

2016-2017 Course Catalo

2013-2014 Course Catalog

2013-2014 Course Catalo

2017-2018 Course Catalog

2017-2018 Course Catalo

2000-2002 Course Catalog

2000-2002 Course Catalo