In this thesis paper, I will document and analyze the process of making my graduate thesis film, Just Like Wild Pete. I will start by stating my overall thesis statement, then move into each specific area of the filmmaking process. I will translate my learning at the University of New Orleans Film and Theatre program into real life situations with this film, as well as detail my successes and struggles throughout the process. I will analyze my own work, and constantly look to how I can improve in the future. In the end, I will determine if my thesis proves true, and if I was successful in the individual aspects of filmmaking, as well as the thesis film as a whole.

The contents of this paper will detail the making of my film Into the Green, a University of New Orleans thesis film. I will examine the processes used to create my film in five parts. Part One will cover the various inspirations and influences that I pulled from to create the story. Part Two will cover the entirety of pre-production and will begin to detail the various collaborators who worked along with me. In Part Three I will discuss the shooting process in Arkansas and in Part Four I will cover the film’s journey through post-production. Finally, in Part Five, I will analyze my filmmaking experience and discuss future plans for Into the Green.

Major companies in the insurance industry—notably Allstate, Progressive, and Farmers—often employ personification as a creative rhetorical tool in digital video advertisements. By leveraging brand characters in various ways, these companies seek to establish trust and engender emotional impact in customers. Allstate ascribes destructive characteristics that are associated with house cats to its Mayhem character; in doing so they evoke the desired emotional responses of humor and fear. Progressive creates and deploys the Motaur character, a visual personification and play on the Centaur; in this case, the company’s rhetorical strategy is to evoke humor and nostalgia that resonate with motorcycle owners. Farmers’ strategy is to win customers by demonstrating experience and empathy; they do so with the Professor Burke character, whose professorial ethos functions to evoke feelings of trust. I employ the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) in my analysis to explore the relationships between personification, emotional appeals, and persuasion.

This thesis deals with advertising images. It contributes to discussion about position of image in present visual field. It also speaks about influence of image on contemporary society. The starting point and theoretical basis are Visual studies. The main ideas are applied to two different constructs of reality, both are tendentious. The first is vision, ideologically and politically constructed during authoritarian socialist regime. The second is current globalized consumer society. In the practical part of the thesis, the analysis focuses on the advertisements of Skoda Auto Company, used in both mentioned visual modes in the Czech Republic in the 20th century. Key words: picture, visual studies, iconology, advertising, globalization, consumer society, propaganda, image.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study provides a social-text analysis of advertising images in queer publications which represent the new millennium up until 2008 in order to explore gaze theory in a queer context by answering the research question, “How have queer men represented themselves to themselves in the new millennium through the queer male gaze?” Inspired by Jean Kilbourne’s study of the image of women in advertising, this research project examines queer, millennial visual advertising images to explore the creation of normative queer behavior, identity, representation and the possible effects of those images on queer male consumers. A brief examination of previous work concerning male gaze as well as visual culture studies and their connection to Kilbourne’s work is addressed within the study. Further, this study discusses the concept of a bi-textual existence for the queer consumer in which identity is constructed from both an out-group (heteronormative) and in-group (homonormative) milieu. The theoretical foundation establishes that the queer male is placed in a hostile visual position—one where he is the dominating and dominated visual signifier in queer culture. Utilizing a stratified random sampling method, 293 images were coded to explore the research objective of constructing what the millennial queer gaze consisted of within full page advertisements in the queer specific publications of Gay Times, Genre, Instinct, and The Advocate. The results of the analysis construct a toxic visual world for the queer consumer dominated by narrow representations, sexual discourse, discriminating ideologies, and a dangerous repetition of heteronormative, hierarchical social structure found in the patriarchal gaze.

<p>This study explores the current socio-political context of the Netherlands through an analysis of <em>Fitna: The Movie</em> (2008), the online video produced by right-wing politician Geert Wilders. I frame the field of analysis as an affective economy of uncertainty in the country, manifesting in the increasing visibility of, for instance, anti-Islam sentiment, declarations of national identity crisis, and public figures claiming to speak on behalf of the “real” Dutch, in the public realm.</p> <p>With photographic footage of Muslims condoning and conducting violence displayed alongside Quranic verses, and a blatant appeal to viewers to “Stop Islamization. Defend our freedom”, Fitna is both product and visualization of the country’s affective economy. To the extent that the conventions and codes of its context shape <em>Fitna</em>’s form and content, the movie provides a visualization of uncertainty in the Netherlands.</p> <p><em>Fitna </em>constitutes both the target and the lens of this analysis. I refract a close attention to the movie’s montage editing, violated/violent images, and use of photographs through the concepts of fear, offense and truth(-telling), respectively. Taking the movie as lens, my analysis elaborates: the experiential dimension of uncertainty, as the disorientation of globalizing modernity; the key figures through which uncertainty circulates, including nation, religion, Islamization and depillarization; and the affect’s primary representational mode as truth telling performance.</p> <p>Rather than explaining (away) opposition to Islam in, or the affective economy of, the Netherlands, this seeks to explore and experiment. I explore the character and mechanics of an affective economy through an experimental methodology centered on a single visual object. Given these objectives, the study closes with reflections upon the potentials and pitfalls of an analysis of <em>Fitna: The Movie</em>, with particular respect to popular narratives recounting the movie’s alleged failure.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In the spirit of Guillermo Del Toro, “Disobedience is a virtue” in life and acts as an essential element in the art of cinema, which allows filmmakers to tell stories about their nativism and imagination. With disobedience, it is a theme that allows filmmakers to resist and rebel against traditional methods of film production and storytelling found in mainstream Hollywood films while breaking barriers of the Cultivation Theory in which molds such Latino stereotypes through the way the media paint the landscape of society. American cinema has utilized stereotypical Latino characters portraying Cholos, occasional sex symbols, indolent labor workers, illiterate immigrants, house housekeepers, nannies, and violent criminals. Mexican and Mexican Americans embodied the importance of disobedience in life to obtain opportunities and with that, filmmakers have used film to their advantage in telling both Latino and non-Latino narratives that branch out from Hollywood’s formula and business of cinema. I will examine six Latino filmmakers and a selected film from each filmmaker to analyze their use of disobedience within their narratives and filmmaking practice. By analyzing the films of Luis Valdez, Gregory Nava, Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, and Fernando Frías De La Parra, I will explore and define how each filmmaker embodies their version of disobedience in the context of Neufeld’s (2015) aesthetic disobedience concept along with Burgous and Linlott’s (2023) additional categories of artistic (filmmaker) disobedience and art world (story world) disobedience.

Through the lens of the horror film and the fairy tale, this thesis explores the notion of the grotesque as a boundary phenomenon—a negotiation of what is self and what is other. As such, it locates the function that the monstrous and the grotesque have in the formation of a personal and social identity. In asking why we take pleasure in the perverse, I explore how permutations of guilt, victimhood, and desire can be actively rewritten, in order to construct a stable sense of self.

I am interested in two spaces obverse to each other: open and closed. An open space develops organically based on how people inhabit it. Interacting with an open space is a dynamic, sporadic, multisensory, immersive, and subjective experience. In such spaces, we are confronted with an alternative aesthetic, one that is in conflict with the seamlessness of a closed space. A closed space is anchored on definite variables like structure, use and boundaries. While interaction between people and space is important, the space is tightly controlled and interaction is designed. Through this thesis project, I present a method that metaphorically transforms the experience of a walk through a closed space into an open-ended and immersive experience. When space develops as a response to our actions, it affords intimacy and a sense of belonging. It facilitates deeper expressiveness through engagement. By applying a method that uses fragmentation, recurrence and motion, I am metaphorically transforming an urban closed space to open. Through this transformation I am creating a fresh person-space dialogue that temporarily destabilizes perception and encourages physical sensation which allows for an intimate experience of the space. An immersive interaction with an open space transgresses the urban sterility of a closed space and is capable of creating a diversity of distinct experiences.

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into the visible and invisible areas of screens. Such experience, and our plastic identities that reside within, marks a collaborative attempt between designers and audience to establish a new protocol of liquid perspectives functioning within and beyond digital space. Digital plasticity itself is a practice, as well as an inextricable process of understanding and deploying identities in the contemporary media-saturated pluralistic environment.