Research Seminar - Making Hollywood Mobile: Labour in Global Film and Television Production

Making Hollywood Mobile: Labour in Global Film and Television Production

Presented by Dr Kevin Sanson (School of Communication, QUT)

Date: 29 September, 2017
Time: 3pm-4pm
Location: Room 740, Michie Building (#9)

Abstract:

Drawing from interviews with screen media practitioners in Atlanta, London, Los Angeles, and Budapest, among other key production hubs, this talk moves past abstract discussions of ‘runaway production’ to map the transformations mobile film and television production has engendered within the work worlds of the craft workers and crewmembers responsible for making our motion pictures. In particular, I argue that international production is not just an inevitable consequence of cost cutting and public subsidy but a product of human labor that is otherwise obscured in popular discourses about global screen production. I furthermore draw attention to the conditions of that work to underscore the shifting spatial dynamics of screen media labour and the consequences those transformations pose to the personal and professional livelihoods of film and television workers. 

Presenter:

Dr Kevin Sanson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology. He also is a founding member of the editorial collective for Media Industries, a new peer-reviewed, open access journal devoted exclusively to critical media industries research. He currently serves as the journal’s managing editor. Previously, Dr Sanson was the Research Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Media Industries Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.