Faculty News - May 2009

Alan Baker's News Wire

The Office of the Provost has announced that Assistant Professor and Director of the Media Arts & Practice Ph.D. Program Steve Anderson has been chosen for one of just two 2009 Provost's Prizes for Teaching with Technology. The review committee and the Technology Enhanced Learning of ITS found that Anderson's positive contributions to USC represent the purpose and spirit of this important award and recognition. Several criteria were used to make the selections, including how learning technologies were incorporated into a course, how the instructor shared experiences associated with the technologies and whether the technology could be sustained or replicated in other courses.

Interactive Media Associate Professor Tracy Fullerton is kicking off a five-year, $850,000 project in the Game Innovation Lab to investigate learning in games. The project is a sub-grant from the UCLA CRESST Center, which was awarded ten million dollars from the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences to pursue games-based research as part of a Center for Advanced Technology [CATS]. The work will combine research on cognitive psychology, instruction, assessment and game design to improve learning for underperforming middle school students in basic math.

On April 30, at the invitation of the Department of Women's Studies at UCLA, Critical Studies Assistant Professor Kara Keeling presented a public lecture entitled Music from the World Tomorrow: Poetry from the Future and the (Im)Possible Politics of Afrofuturism. She will present another public lecture for the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Riverside on May 11 entitled Queer Times, Black Futures. Both presentations are from her book manuscript entitled Queer Times, Black Futures under contract with New York University Press.

Screenwriting Adjunct Gabrielle Kelly has been selected as a Student Mentor in the American Pavilion (AMPAV) at the Cannes Film Festival. She will work with students interning at Cannes and based at AMPAV during the festival.  She will also work on distribution of her independent feature All Ages Night, which she wrote and produced.
 
Production Senior Lecturer Robert Ballo is the director of photography and producer on the independent feature film, Dark Side of Nowhere, along with SCA alums Ken Sanders (producer) and writer Christine Conradt. Principal photography was scheduled to begin May 10.

The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Interactive Media Assistant Professor Christopher Swain about the controversy over an iPhone app that allows users to silence a crying baby by shaking the phone. Apple, which had initially approved the app, removed it and apologized following protests from child welfare groups. "I think [Apple] probably made a judgment quickly that this was playful or whatever," Swain said. "I think it's terrible." Similar controversies have blindsided other nascent, novel interactive technologies, because their popularity grows faster than the ability to control them, he added. Swain also presented a paper entitled "Improving Academic-Industry Collaboration for Game Research and Education" at the Foundations of Digital Games Conference on April 27.
 
Interactive Media Chair Scott Fisher gave an after-dinner talk on "Interactive Media in Education" for a National Science Foundation sponsored workshop on Nanotechnology Education held at USC April 26-28. As part of the workshop, attendees also visited IMD's Game Innovation Lab and the CoDesign Lab for hands-on demonstrations of IMD faculty research on serious games, stereoscopic displays, immersive media and gesture-based interfaces.

Critical Studies Professor Drew Casper completed a documentary to appear with new DVD edition of White Christmas.

Research Associate Professor Richard Weinberg has received a grant from IBM for "Time Capsule 2050."  The goals are to imagine what life will be like in the year 2050; what tools will be useful for creating 2050-era movies and how to preserve movies for long periods of time. The results will be placed in a time capsule to be opened in the year 2050. Selected students will have the opportunity to visit IBM research labs and discuss the future with their leading researchers. The project is a follow-up to last year's "Imagine the World in 2050" symposium at USC.

The Institute of Multimedia's Literacy's Associate Director Virginia Kuhn and Chris Wittenberg completed their third NEA-funded workshop with Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science (ICHASS) last week, traveling to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where they did intensive hands-on sessions with NCSA scientists, looking for ways to integrate high performance computing to the humanities. They also attended the final day of the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collboratory (HASTAC). Kuhn gave a workshop on the analysis of scholarly multimedia as part of HASTAC's new extended workshop series. She also spoke at Media in Transition 6, MIT's international conference begun by the Comparative Media Studies Program and organized in large part by new USC Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Henry Jenkins. The Christian Science Monitor highlighted USC's Institute for the Future of the Book and work by Kuhn in a story on book-related technology. Kuhn, who uses film as a classroom textbook and embedded video in her thesis, is working with a new digital authoring tool dubbed Sophie, the story noted. The open-source software, developed at the institute, creates "books" with pages that are full of video clips, music, narration or a wide range of textual sources. "You enter a world and the tools to search it and plumb its depths, and this will be the new form of experience that we call a book," Kuhn said. An early form of Sophie is available publicly, and the Institute for the Future of the Book is set to release a second edition at the end of the summer.

Production Adjunct John Ferraro is directing Clown Town City Limits, which will be presented at the Steve Allen Theater, 4473 Hollywood Blvd., continuing on the first Sunday of every month (except August) at 8 P.M. According to Ferraro, the play brings together a trio of down and out clowns living in a home that's not the worst place in the world but it's "worst place adjacent." Big Bugs, Corky and Adolph manage to pay a back-handed tribute to the world of clowns while turning it upside-down and inside out, "revealing the darkness inherent in every black-velvet clown painting that ever hung over a frightened child's bed." For tickets, call 323-666-4268 or visit http://www.steveallentheater.com/clown_town.

American Public Media's Marketplace interviewed instructor of Cinema Practice Jason Squire about the Jonas Brothers. "The smart people at Disney position the Jonas Brothers in a series of exposures on different platforms," Squire said. "Each platform represents a different layer of potential customers and revenue." To listen to the story, visit http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/05/01/am_jobros/.

Writer/creator Peter Knight and producer/showrunner Brad Johnson of the new Comedy Central series Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire recently visited Writing Adjunct Jim Staahl's 437 comedy pilot class. Knight discussed the importance of believing in what you create and gave advice on not getting "pigeon-holed" by the industry. Johnson discussed getting original series produced in Europe. Bill Prady, showrunner/co-creator of The Big Bang Theory, visited Staahl’s 434 spec comedy class. Bill pointed out that multi-camera sitcoms are poised to make a return to network TV and that students should have multi-camera writing samples in their portfolios.
 
Screenwriting Adjunct Frank Chindamo gave away the Best Short Comedy Award at the Kansas City Film Fest on April 25. He also gave a symposium on mobisodes and webisodes. Earlier that week, he was on a panel regarding mobile video hosted by Robin Leach for the National Association of Broadcasters (http://www.NAB.org).
 
Writing Adjunct Brad Riddell's Breaking the Story class visited with TV professionals Moira McMahon ('02) and Stephanie Smith ('01) in preparation for developing new pilot pitches. On May 8, the class will pitch their stories to a panel of writers and TV pros including Zach Dodes ('02), Devin Flanagan ('02), Anne Jarmain ('02), Aaron Thomas ('02) and veteran writer/producer Ildy Pulice.
 
Critical Studies Assistant Professor Aniko Imre co-edited (with Ginette Verstraete) a special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies on "Media Globalization and Post-Socialist Identities" (12.2, May 2009). The issue includes articles on satellite footprints and oil production in Central Asia, the Romanian revolution on US television news, hybrid media forms in Poland, Roma Internet networking and human rights, nation-based social networking sites and collaborative video work that challenges the European Union's practices of integration in the East. Imre also contributed an essay to the new edited volume, Intimate Citizenships: Gender, Sexualities, Politics (Routledge, 2009).
 
Adjunct Mark Jean's Finn on the Fly won the Audience Award - Best Feature Film at the 2009 Sprockets Toronto International Film Festival for Children.

Production Adjunct Shirley Jo Finney directed the play Stick Fly, which played at the Matrix Theater in West Hollywood. A Los Angeles Times Critic's Choice, Stick Fly is a story about an upper-middle class African-American family that summers on Martha's Vineyard. 
 
Production Adjunct Kate Amend will serve as an editing advisor at the Documentary Edit and Story Lab from June 21-28 at the Sundance Institute. The lab is an intensive week-long workshop held in the mountains of Utah each summer to encourage nonfiction filmmakers during a critical stage in the creative process. Two of last year's feature documentary Oscar nominees, Trouble The Water and Nerakhoon:The Betrayal, were supported by the Sundance labs. This is the fifth year that Amend has participated.

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Alan Baker