The Last Two Years of David Brachman is a feature-length digital film directed, written and produced by Marcos Casilli in pursuit of the Master of Fine Arts in Film & Digital Media from the University of Central Florida. This is a very personal film that presents a sometimes-humorous approach to the following question: what makes life worth living? The film was made on what is categorized as a microbudget, but following the studio production model for the most part. This thesis presents a critique of that combination, advocating for a "slow cinema" model instead.

Bad Pixels is a feature-length, microbudget, digital motion picture, produced, written, and directed by Alexander Jon Bowser as part of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Film & Digital Media from the University of Central Florida. The materials contained herein serve as a record of the microbudget filmmaking experience. This thesis documents the challenges confronted by a first-time feature filmmaker; an evaluation of both the theory and application of a dynamic microbudget approach to digital content creation. From script development to digital distribution, the thesis aims to reflect on technical and procedural decisions made and assess their impact on the overall experience and final product.

This thesis documents my creative process as the Production Designer on the feature length micro budget film The Last Two Years of David Brachman, written and directed by Marc Casilli. The film is a dark comedy chronicling the life of David Brachman, a twenty-five year old with a stagnant life that is seemingly leading nowhere, as he pledges on his twenty-fifth birthday to change the path of his life in the next two years or commit suicide if he fails. The overall design concept of the film is rooted in realism, but allowed to contain elements that will remove the audience in order to lighten the load of the serious topic of death. With a nod to the 1950s family home and the nostalgia of decades past; David’s world is created to show drastic shifts from his inert, routine life at home to the outside working world in to which he thrusts himself. The world outside of David’s home is seen through a lens that exemplifies stereotypical social roles and thereby adds to his feelings of outcast and loneliness. Creating the versatile world of David Brachman presented challenges with the amount of locations, characters, and costumes changes; however, these challenges were further complicated by working on an overall micro budget of thirty-six thousand dollars, with approximately fifteen hundred dollars allocated to the art department and costuming. These challenges created a need for resourceful acquisition techniques and budgeting to ensure that the overall artistic vision was not sacrificed. Remaining true to the design aesthetic and the director’s vision, my staff and I were able to overcome budgetary challenges, staffing changes that occurred during filming, and shifts in the production dynamic that created a sometimes chaotic filming environment. The careful iv planning and organization of each design element and their execution ensured the successful creation of David’s world and a visual story to compliment the screenplay. Within this thesis I document my design process from my initial design proposal to the director through post production and final viewing of the completed film. Included here are specific details of my design process including script analysis, script breakdowns, location plots, budget tracking, stills from the film, a copy of the finished film, and all the paperwork generated in creating the film. A detailed journal of the filming process including obstacles I encountered as well as the solutions created throughout this process and a self evaluation and reflection on the final product of work are included.

China Run is a 92 1/2 minute documentary film which portrays an ultramarathon runner's record-setting 2,125 mile run across China in 53 days, starting at the Great Wall north of Beijing and concluding in Guangjhou (Canton). It is a story of the difficulties, both physical and emotional, suffered by the runner, as well as the story of his encounters with the people of China.

Over the last four centuries, South Africa has been shaped by the twinned, dialectical histories of violence and resistance to violence. However, because both violence and resistance encompass myriad formations and are underlain with a plethora of ideologies and hermeneutics, studying each - particularly from within critical community psychology - is oftentimes necessarily didactic and reductive. Yet, if this kind of research is to retain emancipatory potential, I contend, it should be both community-oriented and politically committed. In an attempt to understand how violence moves through Thembelihle, a low income community in South Africa, an expansive lens for conceptualising violence and resistance is advanced across this research’s four studies. In Study I, I use discursive psychology to examine how Thembelihle has been constructed in dominant discourse by analysing newspaper reporting on the community. Following this, in Study II and Study III, I draw on multimodal discourse analysis to study representations of quotidian life and political resistance in a participatory documentary film entitled Thembelihle: Place of Hope, which was collaboratively produced by residents of Thembelihle, professional filmmakers and myself. Lastly, in Study IV, I harness the narrative-discursive approach to explore how residents of Thembelihle build community in response to Thembelihle: Place of Hope. It was found that within dominant constructions, Thembelihle was personified as a monolithic and an essentially Other geo-cultural space, made newsworthy principally through its engagement with a broad, often vaguely-conceived, notion of violence. In response to dominant discursive constructions of this kind, community members who featured in and produced the documentary advanced a humanistic conception of Thembelihle which did not accept the different violences to which the community is subject. Following this, audiences of the documentary engaged the affective and political dimensions of community-building in order to advance a democratically conceived notion of collective will. These findings present critical community psychologists and violence scholars with a number of considerations around representation; the multitudinous nature of violence and resistance; psycho-politics; and radical hope. Ultimately, I argue, if such research is to be meaningful, it must be guided by and subordinated to the emancipatory requirements articulated by community members. / Psychology / D. Litt et Phil (Psychology)