About

Welcome to the AFTRS Screen Culture blog a site for anyone interested in ideas and how they impact on our screen stories, screen production and screen industry.

Here you will find regular posts from Dr Karen Pearlman, Dr Matthew Campora and Mike Jones. You will also be able to access information about some of the research projects going on at AFTRS in the Graduate Certificate in Screen Culture, the Masters by Research, and the 2011 Graduate Certificate in Webisodes. The students in these courses blog, too, and we are collecting a blog roll of other interesting sites – let us know if you would like to link. There are four key objectives of this site:

• - expanding and influencing discussion of screen culture
• - representing the thinking going on in and around the AFTRS Screen Studies department
• - making provocations to catalyse action
• - distributing new knowledge to industry

and we welcome you to engage with all of them!

Contributors

ScreenCulture.Net is coordinated by staff of the Screen Studies department of AFTRS. Contributors to the site include  AFTRS Staff, MA Research students, Graduate Certificate students and invited guests.

Dr Karen Pearlman

Dr Karen Pearlman,Head of Screen Studies,  is the author of Cutting Rhythms, Shaping the Film Edit (Focal Press, 2009) and a founding member of the Editorial Board of Lumina, the Australian Journal of Screen Arts and Business, published by AFTRS.

Karen is the co-director of the multi-award winning Physical TV Company, which specializes in stories told by the body. Through Physical TV she has produced or directed nine highly acclaimed and widely screened shorts, a project for mobile phones and the short feature and transmedia work Thursday’s Fictions (ABC-TV) which was reincarnated as a virtual world in Second Life with the support of AFTRS/LAMP. (See www.physicaltv.com.au and www.thursdaysfictions.com) Karen is currently working on a an ipad app and feature film project called More Lies, based on the novel of the same name by Richard James Allen.

Karen’s publications include her work as co-editor of Performing the Unnameable; An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts (Currency Press, 1999) and she has published essays and articles in Metro, RealTime, The Journal of Performance Studies and other anthologies, conferences proceedings and journals. Karen’s other careers include professional editor and professional dancer – performing on the Opera House stages of the world and directing two dance companies.

Dr Matt Campora

Dr. Matthew Campora is a lecturer in Screen Studies at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. He completed his PhD in Film Studies in 2009 at the University of Queensland, where he also lectured and tutored across a range of courses in film, television and media studies. His dissertation, entitled “Multiform Film Narrative: From the Arthouse to the Multiplex” considers subjective-realist narration from its origins in to German Expressionist cinema through its use in contemporary American cinema in films such as Mulholland Drive, Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Matt’s recent publications include various essays in Lumina, and Metro, and his first book will be forthcoming in 2012.

Mike Jones

Mike Jones has a diverse background in screen production, writing and academic research. He has  fifteen years experience in technical production and has worked across broadcast, news-media, post-production, live events and online media. Along with experience in script development he has written widely on screen industry trends, penning more than two hundred published essays, articles and reviews along with a syndicated column and three books for students of screen media.

Mike has extensive experience in museums and exhibitions related to popular culture and media technology. He was formerly manager of the Vectorlab digital media studios at the Powerhouse Museum and coordinated a diversity of projects, seminars and workshops around digital culture and education. Mike has taught courses in both screen studies and digital production as well as having developed educational resources and content for a number of award-winning online projects. In 2007 he was awarded the Professional Teachers Council outstanding service award.

Along with teaching screen studies at AFTRS Mike is involved in research into computer gaming and the development of new software tools for creative production. Mike is currently completing a PhD in cinema aesthetics and new technologies.

www.mikejones.tv