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. |