Kevin Smith's Mobisodes

Television is going through a period of transformation that will leave it altered almost beyond recognition. The one screen we grew up with as a piece of living room furniture, “the video hearth,” has been replaced by a multitude of screens in a dizzying array of shapes and sizes, from towering Imax billboards to miniature cell phone postage stamps. Creative approaches to making content for the new devices have spawned a wave of neologisms, from “Mobisodes” to “webisodes.”

As Dean Robert Rosen observes, the challenge of teaching TV in an era of explosive change is managing to stay abreast of everything new that matters, while avoiding the seductions of fads and fashions that begin to evaporate almost before they are introduced.

The School of Theater, Film and Television has several crucial advantages when it comes to meeting these daunting challenges. We established some of the first academic programs in TV production in the U.S., anticipating the need for them rather than playing catch up. And the School’s Critical Studies program, inspired by the pioneering work in TV criticism of Professor John Caldwell, has conceptualized the key issues in a way that speaks to the realities of the creative community. The UCLA Producers Program has brought to bear the practical wisdom of experienced professionals, without which even the most passionate creative vision will fall short of fulfillment. Recently experimental programs like REMAP and the exploratory Mobisode production workshop taught by directors Kevin Smith (“Clerks”) and Lecurer Rory Kelly (“Sleep With Me”) are digging into the potential applications of the newest technology to what has always been the School’s core mission, telling stories. And, as we strive always to keep our eyes on that prize, the classics of the medium stored (and re-stored) at the UCLA Film & Television Archive stand as inspiring points of comparison against which all our efforts will be measured.

The initiatives described on the following pages offer an overview of the most important ways in which TFT’s multifaceted, energetic and wide-ranging commitment to television will enable us to meet the challenge of the most important communication medium of our age.

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Keywords

"kevin smith" "rory kelly" 

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