Programs and Facilities
The Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television and New Media is a Place for New Programs
When completed, the Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television and New Media will include special conference facilities, a public film theater, film and television archives, media labs, production suites, screening rooms, and classrooms that will provide the arena for dynamic curricula, public programming, film series, and residencies. Already recognized by university and national awards for their teaching and research, the faculty will bring new programs and scholarship to the public as well as to their students. The Center will provide an intellectual as well as a physical space in which the university and the media industries can interact through classes, research projects, and colloquia.
Teaching Film, Television and New Media
The heart of the Center’s teaching will take place in the Pollock film theater, seminar and screening rooms, and specially-equipped facilities designed to teach the full range of 20th- and 21st-century moving image technologies, from silent films to satellites, from Hollywood to Bollywood, from cycloramas to cyberspace. The theater will serve as home for the Film Department’s well-known course, "Hollywood: Anatomy of an Industry," which brings to campus some of the most active and creative people working in the industry today. The theater also will host the student-run Santa Barbara Film Society series, as well as the popular Careers in Media panels with alumni. This facility will help the 4,000-5,000 students who take our courses annually to be better prepared to understand media in all of its forms.
Public Film Programs
For the first time in the Santa Barbara region, we will have a state-of-the-art public film theater, the Pollock Theater, which will be dedicated to year-round programming of a diverse array of films and filmmakers from across the country and the world. A classroom by day and a public theater at night, it will be a place in which students and community come together. The new facility will be equipped to show everything from early silent films to the latest in digital filmmaking. Every year nearly 30 film series—ranging from Yiddish cinema to new Iranian cinema—circulate to university and museum film theaters around the country. The theater will serve as a venue for those series, as well as original series developed at UCSB and then circulated to other theaters. The theater and its film programming will give students and citizens an opportunity to engage with world affairs by viewing and discussing the rich offerings of an international moving-image culture.The Pollock Theater will also serve as another vibrant screening venue for UCSB Arts and Lectures and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
Laboratories for Teaching and Research
UCSB is committed to involving graduates and undergraduates in primary research. Hundreds of students participated in research projects on the impact of violence and sexual content in American television that became major studies widely reported in the national media. Students will have access to film and television archives and work with faculty who edit leading scholarly journals. The new Television Archive will be available to researchers, students, and faculty, not only from Film and Media Studies and Communication but also from the more than fifteen other programs and departments on campus engaged in media and media-based research, ranging from Women’s Studies to Media Arts and Technology. Undergraduate, graduate, and faculty researchers will work together to devise new methods for studying the impact of media on society as well as new ways to bring that research to a wider public.
A Context for Production
A unique feature of the UCSB student media experience is that production training takes place only in the context of a strong liberal arts and sciences education. Students learn to make individual and crew films while pursuing an intensive curriculum in media history, theory, and criticism. Some courses are co-taught by production and critical studies faculty, as well as award-winning alumni directors, writers, and animators. Students learn the stories and myths of their own and other cultures through literature, dramatic arts, history of art and architecture, philosophy, history, and ethnic studies. In this context, a production facility will provide our students the space and technology they need to pursue the kind of creative, independent, experimental work that is our program’s signature. The new facility will include a production stage, postproduction suite, sound and music scoring room, animation room, and demo/screening rooms for small production classes. Media will include film, video, digital photography and video, interactive digital media, web sites, and more.
A Place for Conversation and Collaboration
Visiting Research Fellows in residence at UCSB will collaborate with faculty and students in such areas of media scholarship as, media literacy, media ownership, children’s and youth culture and the media, information technology and globalization, international cinema, the humanities and media policy, democratic access to new media technologies, film and the environment, and media history and historiography.
Industry Fellows will work with students and scholars on film and television production and study of media. The Center’s new conference facilities, with Internet and video-conferencing equipment, will provide a forum for policy makers, elected officials, and experts from government and industry to interact with UCSB researchers. Colloquia, seminars, and workshops will address topics such as media ownership, violence in the media, children and advertising, access of women and minorities to jobs in the entertainment industry, and uses of new technologies by various social groups.
