170713 UE Film and archives: Stock footage and everything under the sun (2019S)

Fundamentals of becoming an American Film Detective.
A media survey course overviewing a century of films, television, radio, music and graphics and the technologies behind each form of entertainment.

SUMMARY

What is the relationship between the various forms of mass media and the technologies that helped create them? How can we research the effects of mass media on society? Finally, how do we research media effects on society when literally millions of films, TV shows, radio shows, records and artworks have been created?

Fundamentals of becoming an American Film Detective is a course that critically examines the history and content of film, television, radio, music and advertising, the technologies behind them.

During the course, you will be given the tools to become a true film detective, able to conduct specific research on mass media, using archival media to figure out what period of time it came from and how it fits within the society it was produced within.

A number of important issues will be explored, including:

- We live in a post-industrial society in which regulation of ‘for-profit media’ is minimal at best. How do we critically analyze the discursive power of media in our lives?
- How do we analyze sub-textual messages that are inherent in much of our media?
- Media conglomerates have grown in power and size over the past 3 decades. How has this consolidation affected the content and context of media?
- How is the concept of ‘mainstreaming’ tied to the media?
- How has the ‘youth culture’ resisted mainstreaming by the media and in fact helped create new values toward ethnicity, gender and ethnicity?
- How does technology affect the content of media and its messages?
- How does the distribution and ownership of media entities affect both production and content?
- How has the shift of media ownership affected political content of messages?

The course will - over its two brief weeks - focus on motion pictures, television, radio and advertising through a combination of readings, screenings, live lectures and discussions.

WHAT IS ARCHIVAL MATERIAL

The course will look at the history of media content through the use of archival material. Archival material constitutes everything that has been created up to the second you are reading this introduction. Everything. Films, TV shows, webisodes, print ads. Posters. Music. Everything. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it has nothing to do with being old.
That’s right. Just like everything in our lives, archival material is all the material that falls into the past tense. One second old. One hour old. One hundred thousand years old. It’s archival material. Because archival material contains such a huge number of sources, we will focus on how to research and find specific archival elements that will help you tell the story your research focuses on.

ABOUT OUR TEXT.
Our principal text is the book I just finished writing. Stock Footage + Everything Else Under the Sun will be your guidebook to unleashing your power of finding and using archival material in helping you tell the best, most powerful and interesting story.

WHERE DO YOU FIND ARCHIVAL MATERIAL

Everywhere. Both fiction and non-fiction programs may all start with the same common denominator, a desire to tell a story about factual events, but the filmmaker has a choice of how they are going to tell that story. Will it exist only in the present tense, or will they create a story that integrates a contemporary narrative with a storyline that ties in the past? The key ingredient in this form of creating entertainment is the use of archival elements.
The great advantage of all this mate- rial is that it quickly establishes exactly at what time your story takes place, where it takes place and the environment it takes place in. It can take us back a week or centuries. It is one of the greatest tools filmmakers have available to them.