The Research and Intellectual Life Committee invites you to the launch of the Communication Research @UMass Amherst series on Friday December 1st, at noon in ILC N345. The series will be a new space to feature research and creative projects of COMM faculty, graduate students, and alumni in and at the intersections of media and technology studies, media effects, social interaction and culture, performance studies, film studies and production.
The first talk will be offered by Dr. Brendan McClauley, a recent grad and current lecturer of our program whose work on media industries examines how cultural production practices are transformed at the intersection of technology and performance. More information about his presentation is included below. Please share in your classes and with your networks.
We look forward to seeing you all on December 1st at noon!
Losing Color Consciousness:
How Platformization and Premiere Pro make Film-making Practices Precarious
By Brendan McCauley, UMass Amherst
with J.D. Swerzenski, University of Mary Washington
Friday December 1st at Noon, ILC 345 and on zoom
For online access, please register at https://bit.ly/COMMResearch_BMcCauley
As filmmaking becomes digital, platforms like Adobe’s Premiere Pro introduce new forms of automation and AI into the production process through the tools filmmakers rely on. This not only puts labor at risk, but also the producer developed practices, languages, and values that many labor positions are predicated on. This talk elaborates one instance of this to show how Premiere’s recently adopted “Lumetri” tools upend a century of film color production practices to sell collaborative efforts back to individual users as “effects”. Premiere promises creative freedom but renders the creative labor of color production as a problem to “correct”.