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#Folding paper monsters dracula mummy wolfman frankenstein series#

Indeed, Bob has helped organize a visit from Henry Jenkins, formerly of MIT and now at USC, who's probably the best known of this scholars who have taken on this important dimension of contemporary culture. And in that role he's part of a rich community of scholars who take the productive activity of what used to be thought of as passive consumers very, very seriously. So he's what's now called an aca-fan, and academic fan.

And you can experience this lovely writing voice in his blog, Graphic Engine, which he maybe can't quite post as often as he used to, because he has a very small baby, who's in the back, I hope doesn't distract you.īut it's no surprise that Bob is also a fan of these franchises and phenomenon practices that are the object of his critical intelligence and scholarly research. For example, the technology part that I really need, lovely bibliographic essay on CGI, computer generated imagery, or just an entry on the history of the personal computer for a book on video games, that I learned so much to read. And he can explain technology and very complicated things like theory very clearly. He's just published a short piece on Watchman, in a dossier on film post 9/11, so sort of thinking about how these kinds of sci-fi and thriller genres are very much affected by the war on terror. And as Bob perhaps single-handedly is showing us, key to contemporary film theory.īob also writes about video games, and he has influential essays on fun things like retro gaming, Lara Croft, and Doom 3. And again, I think that will be an important way of addressing something that is so key to contemporary film culture. And he's recently signed with BFI Palgrave Macmillan, with two co-editors, to publish an anthology called Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts. He's published a very important article from that project called 'Migration of Forms: Bullet Time as Micro-Genre,' which looks at the bullet time effect that's used in The Matrix but also in wider places in popular culture. So I think that there's some expansiveness to his work. Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix, if we can remember The Matrix. I always like to say that this book not only takes on one of the big media franchises of the late 20th, early 21st century, but all four. So his book manuscript, More Than Meets The Eye: Special Effects in Fantastic Media Franchises, is currently under review at NYU Press, and this is a revision of his stupendous dissertation, it's really groundbreaking, for the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he received his PhD. He works on all kinds of things, besides horror and sci-fi model kits, which is research from a new book project, he writes about special effects in film.

As you know from the title and the visual illustrations, the poster but also this fabulous slide that's leaving me speechless, Bob's work is really fun. Bob's been here since 2006, and it really changed my life to have him as a near and dear colleague, my intellectual and daily life. It's with great pleasure that I introduce my colleague in Film and Media Studies, Assistant Professor Bob Rehak. And he'll be introduced by his colleague in Film and Media Studies today, Patty White. His title is Materializing Monsters: Fan Objects and Fantastic Media. Today, as you know, we're gonna be having a talk by Bob Rehak, from Film and Media Studies.

#Folding paper monsters dracula mummy wolfman frankenstein series#

Speaker 1: Welcome everyone, to the next in the series of faculty lectures. Materializing Monsters: Fan Objects and Fantastic Media March 27th, 2012Ī Talk by Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies Bob Rehak Audio Transcript