TV Production in the Academy: Bringing Commercial Practices into the Classroom

This paper critiques the tradition of television programme making within the context of academia and the ‘real world’ of commercial television programme-making and discusses how to maximise the commercial opportunities by understanding the nature of the television business and how programmes are commissioned and funded. It explores the barriers between these worlds, and looks at how they can be removed to enable a closer working relationship that has maximum impact. One way of doing this is through internal production companies housed at Universities and ran with the expertise and track records of dual professionals. What are the implications of this and is it a sustainable and helpful way for academia to engage with the broader screen industries?

The New Directions in Film and Television Production Studies conference brought together over 100 scholars from across the UK, Europe and beyond to discuss the rapidly developing field of media production studies.

New Directions in Film and Television Production Studies,
Watershed Cultural Cinema and Digital Creativity Centre, 14-15 April 2015
A major event in the rapidly expanding field of Production Studies, this two-day international conference sold-out all three rooms
of the Watershed’s conference centre as scholars from across
the UK, Europe, Australia, the US and the Caribbean explored myriad approaches to the production of the film and television industries. With panels ranging from the theoretical, historical and methodological strategies involved in industry research to others investigating the new technologies, business models, policy frameworks and consumption strategies shaping the sector, the conference confirmed the strikingly interdisciplinary nature of Production Studies and the diversity of the cutting-edge research taking place within it. As well as keynote presentations from
two leading scholars in the field - Professor Philip Drake (Edge
Hill University) and Professor John Thornton Caldwell (UCLA)
- speakers also included a number of high-profile figures from
the film and televisions industries, including Laura Marshall (Icon Films), Kate Ogborn (Fly Films), Frank Mannion (Swipe Films) and Rod Stoneman (former Channel 4 Commissioning Editor, current head of Huston School of Film and Media, Galway). By bringing academia and industry together and exploring the current research taking place in the field, the conference also helped forge avenues for future study and as such - as described in a subsequent report on the conference - will surely prove ‘a key milestone in the development of Production Studies’
(http://mecetes.co.uk/new-directions-in-film-and-tv- production-studies/).