October 7, 2010

Medium Specificity -- a Syllabus -- and the future of Transmedia Narrative Theory and Criticism

Introduction by Daniel Pereira

Last year, the posting of Prof. Jenkins' syllabus for his inaugural Fall 2009
class on Transmedia at USC garnered an enormous response (cross-posted here on Sept. 22, 2009: Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment: A Syllabus).

With this success in mind, following is a cross posting of the syllabus of Prof. Jenkins current Fall 2010 graduate seminar offering entitled Medium Specificity -- a Syllabus.

Prof. Jenkins' intellectual exploration over the course of this semester dovetails nicely with a forthcoming C3 White Paper (currently in a draft editorial stage), which explores the future of the criticism and language surrounding transmedia narrative theory and practice.

It seems we are embarking on a discourse related to transmedia narrative for which there is already a 'canon' and common specific language for cinema and other media forms.

Prof. Jenkins' deep exploration of the specific characteristics of particular media forms will (by the very nature of the structure of his course) reveal hybridities, points of intersection and/or areas where certain media insist on a "purity" specific to their form.

From these insights, the language to describe the techniques and to analyze more effectively "cross-media platform development", "deep media" (what we call here at MIT CMS C3 Transmedia Storytelling) will emerge.

As C3 Research Specialist Alex Leavitt pointed out in a C3 May 4, 2010 blog posting: "Where Is Our Transmedia Mozart?"

Before a Transmedia Mozart emerges, for our research purposes, the more fundamental question is: where is our 'medium shot', "jump cut", "the gaze," scratch-on-film techniques, "mis-en-scene", diegesis, montage, contrapuntal sound and genre classifications specific to and applicable to transmedia storytelling?

What is the framework and the language the future Buster Keaton, D.W. Griffith, Kenneth Anger, Stan Lee, Gregg Toland, Elia Kazan, Lucas-Scorsese-Spielberg, Stan Brakhage, Dario Argento, Hal Ashby, Andrei Tarkovsky, Guillermo del Toro, Mathew Labatique, Vincente Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Robert Elswit, Octavia Butler, Katherine Bigelow, Robert Yeoman, Arturo Ripstein, Christopher Doyle, Isaac Julien, Laurie Anderson, Robert Frank, Chris Marker, Neil Gaiman, Brian Eno, Laurent Cantet, Matthew Barney, Lina Wertmuller, Todd Haynes, Spike Lee, George Stevens or Maya Deren will be using to conceive of and create their transmedia masterpieces?

What universal, structural language and techniques will be utilized to conceive of, create, distribute, advance and innovate upon transmedia storytelling - creating a climate and culture for true masters of the medium to emerge?

Who is the future Eisenstein, Arnheim, Bordwell, Bazin, Barthes, Lipsitz, McCloud, Jenkins or Sitney who will be making major contributions to this critical discourse in the years and decades ahead?

Through this current syllabus, Prof. Jenkins puts inspirational wind in our sails as we embark on this fascinating journey. Enjoy.




Medium Specificity -- a Syllabus


I have been using this blog to share the syllabi of the new courses I am developing for the University of Southern California -- courses which reflect my long-standing research interests.

This semester, I was asked to develop a course for the multidisciplinary iMap program in the Cinema School, a program which encourages the interplay between theory and practice. The original subject was developed by the late Anne Friedberg, so I am very much aware of her intellectual legacy as I developed my approach to this subject matter.

I also saw it as a chance to revisit some of my own intellectual roots -- with different topics hearing paying tribute to faculty who have influenced my own intellectual development, including Edward Branigan, Rick Altman, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and David Thorburn -- as well as some such as Tom Gunning and George Lipsitz who have shaped my thinking from afar.

I intend to use this course both to expose students to key ideas drawn from a range of different areas of media studies and to get them to think critically about a range of different media texts. Film, no doubt, plays a special role in this class, because there is such a fully developed tradition of critical and theoretical writing there, but we will also be constantly returning to contemporary developments in digital media as a space against which to test these various theories.

For me, the formal and aesthetic dimensions of this course will form a nice contrast with the more social and ideological issues I am exploring in the Civic Media class that I shared with my blog readers earlier this summer.

Medium Specificity

This course takes as its central themes the borders and boundaries between media. Early on, we will consider some attempts to develop theories of medium specificity - trying to determine what traits define film, photography, and games with a focus on what differentiates them from other existing modes of representation. How is photography distinct from painting? What are the defining traits of the cinematic? Are games narratives? As we deal with these theories, we will show how they each moved from descriptions of the properties of specific medium to prescriptions for what the aesthetics of these media should look like. It is at this intersection where this course most clearly explores the relationship between theory and practice. Even with these medium-specific approaches, we will be exploring how their development required a mode of comparison across media. So, we see Eisenstein, for example, resting his theory of the cinematic on analogies to text-based media and Bazin drawing on notions of photography and theater to talk about cinema. And we will explore how writers like Arnheim sought to resist the coming of sound in order to protect what they saw as the "purity" of their medium specific approach.

As the course continues, we will dig more deeply into media theories and practices which consciously explore the intersections between expressive media rather than marking the borders between them. We will explore notions of interface, affordance, narrative, character, space and spectacle, globalization, and cultural hierarchy as they relate to the interplay between different media systems and practices. Here, we will be looking at theories which celebrate hybridity and border crossing rather than seeing them as problematic. Yet, in doing so, these theories still make implicit assumptions about what each medium does best or what each has to contribute to a transmedia system. So, again, we will find that the notion of medium specificity plays a central role in such formulations.

Across the course, we will be looking at a range of media texts as vehicles through which to test and expand the theories we are studying. These texts are sometimes read as experiments in medium specificity and border crossing and in other cases these works are seen as making their own conceptual contributions to our understanding of the interplay between different kinds of media. In every case, they will be looked at as illustrations of how media theory might inform creative practice and how production may help extend theoretical arguments.

Books:
David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Harvard University Press)
Rick Altman, A Theory of Narrative (Columbia University Press)
Bryan Talbot, Alice in Sunderland (Dark Horse)
David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.), Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (MIT Press)

Assignments:

Contributions to Class Forum on Blackboard
(20 Percent) Students should share short reflections or questions on the materials read for each week's session, which can be used as a springboard for class discussions. Ideally, these should be posted by 10 a.m. on the day the class is being held.

The Specificity of Digital Media (20 Percent) Much of what we are reading this semester was written in regard to early 20th century media such as film and photography. In what ways have these debates surfaced as our culture has responded to the emergence of new media of expression? What similarities or differences do you see in terms of the debates about games or the web and the debates about these earlier media? Which ideas from the past offer us the best tools for thinking about the present and future of digital expression? (Sept. 27)

Textual Analysis Paper (20 percent)
Students should select one of the media texts we have watched through the class session and develop a five page paper which explores the relationship of this work to its medium. You should draw on ideas from one or more of the essays we've read this semester to help you frame your approach. OR you should select a specific theme or creative problem (such as representing simultaniety or microcosm) which has been expressed across media. Select at least three texts representing three different media and discuss how the creative artists involved how exploited the potentials of those media to work through this challenge. (Nov. 8)

Final Paper (40 percent)
- Students should write a 20 page essay on a topic of their own interests as they reflect to the core themes and concerns which have run through the class. Students may consider doing a creative project which explores these same issues with permission of the instructor. Students should submit a one to two page abstract of the project by the mid-term so that they can receive feedback as they are developing their concepts. Students will give a 10 minute final presentation sharing their project with the class.(TBD)

August 23rd
Kristin Thompson, "Take My Film, Please," Observations on Film Art
Laura Marks,"The Memory of Touch," The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment and The Senses
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
Donald A. Norman, "Affordances, Conventions and Design," Interactions 6(3):38-43, May 1999, ACM Press.

Screening: Sita Sings the Blues (2009)

The Problem of Medium Specificity (August 30th)
Geoffrey Pingree and Lisa Gitelman, "What's New About New Media?," New Media
1740-1915
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp. xi-xxii.
Noel Carroll, "Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-Consciously Invented Arts:
Film, Video, and Photography," Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996), pp. 3-24.
D.N. Rodowick, "The Virtual Life of Film," The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2007), pp.1-24.
David Bordwell, "Defending and Defining the Seventh Art: The Standard Version of
Stylistic History," On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp.1-45
Rudolph Arnheim, "Television, a Prediction" and "A New Lacoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film," Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp.199-220.
Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, 'Statement on Sound,'
The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939, edited by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 234-35.
Screening: Applause (1929)

LABOR DAY, NO CLASS (September 6th)

Medium Specificity in Cinema (September 13th)
David Bordwell, "Against the Seventh Art: Andre Bazin and the Dialectical Program,"
and "The Return to Modernism: Noel Burch and the Oppositional Program," On
the History of Film Style
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp.46-83.
Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," Film Quarterly 13(4)
(Summer 1960), pp. 4-9.
Andre Bazin, "The Myth of Total Cinema," and "Theater and Film", What is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Sergei Eisenstein, "Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today", "The Cinematic Principle and
the Ideogram," Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1949), pp.28-44, 195-256.
Rick Altman, 'Dickens, Griffith and Film Theory Today," in Jane Gaines (ed.), Classical
Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars
(Durham: Duke University Press,
1992), pp. 9-47.
(Rec. for reading after class: Kristin Thompson, "Playtime: Comedy on the Edge of Perception," Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Trenton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Screening: PlayTime (1967)

Medium Specificity in Photography (September 20th)
David Company, "Stillness," Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), pp. 22-59.
Jane Gaines, "Photography Surprises the Law: The Portrait of Oscar Wilde," Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)
Robert Harriman and John Louis Lucaites, "The Borders of the Genre: Migrant Mother
and the Times Square Kiss," No Captions Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public
Culture, and Liberal Democracy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 49-92.
Susan Sontag, "Photographic Evangels," On Photography (New York: Delta, 1973), pp. 115-152.
Screening: La Jetee (1962)

Medium Specificity in Game Studies (September 27th)
Henry Jenkins, "Games, The New Lively Art"
Markku Eskelinen, "Towards Computer Games Studies"
Janet Murray, "From Game-Story to Cyberdrama"
Jesper Juul, "The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for the Heart of Gameness,"
Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, "Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers"
Screening: Run Lola Run (1998)

Windows, Frames, and Mirrors (October 4th)
Anne Friedberg, "The Virtual Window," in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.)
Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 337-354.
Jay David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, "Remediation," Configurations 4(3) (1996),
311-358.
Lev Manovich, "Cinema as a Cultural Interface"
Nicholas Dulac and Andre Gaudrault, "Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of the
Attraction: Optical Toys and the Emergence of a New Cultural Series," in Wanda
Strauven (ed.) The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).
(Rec.) David Bordwell, "Prospects for Progress: Recent Research Programs," On the History of Film Style (Harvard University Press)

Screening: Strange Days (1995)

Attractions and Spectacles (October 11th)
David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, "The Aesthetics of Transition," in David Thorburn
and Henry Jenkins (eds.) Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003)
Henry Jenkins, "'A Regular Mine, A Reservoir, a Proving Ground': Reconstructing the
Vaudeville Aesthetic," What Made Pistachio Nuts: Early Sound Comedy and the
Vaudeville Tradition
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 59-96.
Henry Jenkins, "'I Like to Hit Myself in the Head': 'Vulgar Modernism' Revisited"
(Forthcoming)
Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-
Garde;" Charles Musser, "Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and
Narrativity;" Scott Bukattman, "Spectacle, Attractions and Visual Pleasure," in Wanda Strauven (ed.) The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), pp.381-388, 389-416, 71-84.
Screening: Hellzapoppin (1941)

Migratory Characters (Monday, October 18th)
Bryan Talbot, Alice in Sunderland (Dark Horse, 2007).
Will Brooker, "Illustrators of Alice" Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (New York: Continuium, 2005), pp. 105-198.
Christina Rossetti, "From Speaking Likenesses (1874)," Frances Hodgson Burnett,
"Behind the White Brick (1876)," and E. Nesbit, "Justnowland (1912)," in Carolyn Sigler (ed.), Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions in Lewis Carroll's Alice Books (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), pp. 50-65, 66-78, 179-192.
Screening: Alice (1988)

Spectacular Media Spaces (October 25th)
Angela Ndalianis, "Architectures of the Senses: Neo-Baroque Entertainment Spectacles,"
in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.) Rethinking Media Change: The
Aesthetics of Transition
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp.355-374.
Constance Balides, "Immersion in The Virtual Ornament: Contemporary "Movie Ride"
Films," in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.) Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 315-336.
Scott Bukatman, "There's Always...Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic
Experience," Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Super-Men in the 20th
Century
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 13-31.
Lauren Rabinovitz, "More Than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture
Through Hale's Tours, IMAX and Motion Simulator Rides," Lauren Rabinovitz
and Abraham Geil (eds.) Memory Bytes: History, Technology and Digital Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp.99-125.
Screening: TBA

Forms of Narrative
(November 1st)
Rick Altman, "Dual-Focus Narrative," "Single-Focus Narrative," "Multiple-Focus
Narrative," A Theory of Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 55-98, 119-190, 241-291.
Screening: Gilda (1946)

Transmedia Logics (November 8th)
Henry Jenkins, "The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling," Confessions of an Aca-Fan,
Screening Sleep Dealer (2008)

Hybridity and the Dialogic (November 15th)
Brian Larkin, "Extravagant Aesthetics: Instability and the Excessive World of Nigerian
Film," Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria
(Durham: Duke University, 2008), pp. 168-216.
George Lipsitz, "Cruising Around the Historical Bloc: Postmodernism and Popular Music
in East Central Los Angeles," Time Passages: Collective Memory and American
Popular Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 133-162.
George Lipsitz, "Kalfou Danjere," Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music,
Postmodernism and the Focus on Place
(London: Verso, 1997).
Ian Condry, "Yellow B-Boys, Black Culture, and The Elvis Effect," Hip-Hop Japan:
Rap and The Paths of Cultural Globalization
(Durham: Duke University Press,
2006).
Screening: This is Nollywood (2007)

High and Low in Television Culture
(November 22nd)
Lynn Spigel, "Hail, Modern Art: Postwar 'American' Painting and the Rise of
Commercial Television," and "Silent TV: Ernie Kovacs and the Noise of Mass
Culture," TV By Design: Modern Art and The Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp.19-67, 178-222.
Screening: Best of Ernie Kovacs, other selections.

Final Presentations (November 29th)

October 1, 2010

Prof. Jenkins' Big Brazilian Adventure (June 2010)

As mentioned in the C3 Blog Post of 9/13/10 (What Prof. Jenkins Did This Summer [Comic-Con and Transmedia Brazil]) following is a cross post of Prof. Jenkins account of his visit to Brazil in May:







My Big Brazilian Adventure


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Of the foreign language editions of Convergence Culture, probably the best selling one was the version published in Portuguese and distributed primarily in Brazil. Thanks to the support of Mauricio Mota and the Alchemists, a transmedia company which works in Rio and Los Angeles, my book has stimulated enormous interest in that country, with companies such as Globo and Petrobras buying hundreds of copies to give to their employees and clients as Brazil seeks to better understand the digital age at a moment of deep cultural and technological transition.

Why Brazil? Two primary reasons: First, Brazil is at the center of the so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), countries which economists believe are going to be dominant economic (and I suspect, cultural) powers in the 21st century. These are countries on the rise, countries which have embraced new media and are surfing it to gain greater influence over the planet. Much as China has gained greater visibility in recent years through the Olympics and the current Shanghai Expo, Brazil is positioned to gain wider attention by hosting the Olympics and the World Cup in the next few years. It is a country with a strong digital infrastructure and thriving creative industries.

Second, unlike the United States, Brazil has held onto strong folk and participatory traditions, despite the rise of modern mass media. Seymour Papert famously used the Samba Schools as his illustration of how informal and community based learning works and that example has stuck in my head from my early days at MIT:

If you dropped in at a Samba School on a typical Saturday night you would take it for a dance hall. The dominant activity is dancing, with the expected accompaniment of drinking, talking and observing the scene. From time to time the dancing stops and someone sings a lyric or makes a short speech over a very loud P.A. system. You would soon begin to realize that there is more continuity, social cohesion and long term common purpose than amongst transient or even regular dancers in a typical American dance hall. The point is that the Samba School has another purpose then the fun of the particular evening. This purpose is related to the famous Carnival which will dominate Rio at Mardi Gras and at which each Samba School will take on a segment of the more than twenty-four hour long procession of street dancing. This segment will be an elaborately prepared, decorated and choreographed presentation of a story, typically a folk tale rewritten with lyrics, music and dance newly composed during the previous year. So we see the complex functions of the Samba School. While people have come to dance, they are simultaneously participating in the choice, and elaboration of the theme of the next carnival; the lyrics sung between the dances are proposals for inclusion; the dancing is also the audition, at once competitive and supportive, for the leading roles, the rehearsal and the training school for dancers at all levels of ability.

From this point of view a very remarkable aspect of the Samba School is the presence in one place of people engaged in a common activity - dancing - at all levels of competence from beginning children who seem scarcely yet able to talk, to superstars who would not be put to shame by the soloists of dance companies anywhere in the world. The fact of being together would in itself be "educational" for the beginners; but what is more deeply so is the degree of interaction between dancers of different levels of competence. From time to time a dancer will gather a group of others to work together on some technical aspect; the life of the group might be ten minutes or half an hour, its average age five or twenty five, its mode of operation might be highly didactic or more simply a chance to interact with a more advanced dancer. The details are not important: what counts is the weaving of education into the larger, richer cultural-social experience of the Samba School.

My Student Ana Domb Krauskopf recently wrote a fascinating white paper for the Convergence Culture Consortium on Techno Brega, a form of popular music in regional Brazil, which operates under a radically different model of production and distribution which is being studied by many in the Free Culture movement.

If you accept my premise that digital participatory culture is what happens when we apply folk culture logic to the content of mass culture in an era where we have expanded capacities for circulation, then it makes sense that digital culture is going to take a very different shape in Brazil than in the United States. Given this history, my work seems especially resonant with Brazilian readers and I am feeling a strong tug to spend more time in that country.

I spent the last week and a half of May in Brazil, speaking with several key players there in the efforts to make the country a key digital player, including Petrobras, the leading oil company, and Globo, a key media producer and distributor. While I was there, I was interviewed by half a dozen or so of the leading print and television journalists.


The key event during my stay in Rio was a talk to creative workers inside Globo's Project, their primary production facility on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of a truly spectacular cluster of mountains and on the edge of the rain forest. I was consistently impressed in Rio by the ways that the natural world was fully integrated into the life of the city.

sugarloaf 1.JPG

I was able to go to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain and look down on the city. Scattered throughout Rio are massive outcroppings of exposed rock -- to call them mountains, though they are mountain sized, does not really capture the oddness of these protrusions. They are much closer to Stone Mountain in my native Atlanta (of course without the carvings of Confederate generals!) than anything else I had ever seen. The city is wrapped in and around these mountains. In some cases, the Favela run up the sides of mountains. The more desirable land is at their foot. They are contained by the beaches and oceans that surround much of the city. And threaded through these pockets of development remain large forests. The effect is close to the technological utopian conception of the city as an integrated environment where nature and technology can co-exist. It is hard to go far in Rio without confronting the natural world and the companies where I spoke were very overt about their commitments to Green policies.

The event at Globo was simply spectacular. The production people had turned a soundstage into what can only be described as a set. Not only had they taken a key motif from the cover of my book and blown it up to the size of a wall, adding in massive television screens on either side, but they had taken other elements from the book's design and decorated the entire hall. It was packed with hundreds of people who wanted to learn more about convergence and transmedia. And the event was being webcast and live-blogged so the words were being transmitted to many who could not be physically present. I presented an opening talk on transmedia which drew upon my recent He-Man essay and my 7 Principles of Transmedia Storytelling paper, both of which have already been shared on my blog, and ended with some thoughts about future challenges confronting transmedia producers which I hope to share with my readers soon.


globo 2.jpg
Afterwords, I was joined on stage by Mark Warshaw, who had developed transmedia for Heroes and Smallville and now is a key partner in The Alchemists, and Florish Klink, a recently minted graduate of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program who is becoming the group's Chief Participation Officer (their expert on fan relations). And we were hit with all kinds of thoughtful questions from the audience, questions which showed just how carefully they had listened and absorbed the insights from my work and how much they were thinking through the future of media in their country. In some ways, they are a step behind developments in North America -- for example, the DVR has not yet come to Rio -- but they are learning the lessons of the early adapter countries and will be ready as they reinvent their media system for the 21st century.

Afterwards, we went on a tour of the production facilities. In many ways, they resemble the classic film studios of the Golden Era of Hollywood, except that they are managed by digital dasebases. So, there are large backlots and vast sound stages. We were shown, for example, a scale reconstruction of a Sao Paolo shopping mall which was used as the setting for a youth-oriented telanovela.

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And we were driven through a lovingly recreated neighborhood from the south of Italy which is the setting of another of their popular series. I am posing here with Mauricio Mota and Flourish Klink from The Alchemists.

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We toured a vast warehouse holding props which were in storage from previous productions and could be called up from the database when needed for new series and another warehouse where costumes were stored, organized by the decade where the stories were set. Alongside the storehouses, there was a factory of workers sewing new costumes to be used, often in just a few hours, on one or another of the projects they were filming and there were construction crews that could build and breakdown sets on a daily basis.


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We walked through the soundstages and saw Passione, a telanovela, being shot. We met briefly the young and very attractive stars Mariana Ximenes and Reynaldo Gianechinni, who have been called the Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt of Brazil. And we were able to watch them shoot a scene from an upcoming episode, standing in the booth with the director as they swapped between five cameras which were filming the scene. It was one of fifteen scenes for the series that were scheduled to be shot that day amongst ten or so settings in the studio devoted to Passione's production. The scenes were shot out of sequence 4 or 5 episodes at a time to allow them to complete their needs of a setting, break it down, and make way for the next setting, all in the course of a 1-2 day period of time. The folks with us who worked in Hollywood were astonished at both the attention to detail in the production design but also the efficiency of the operation over all.

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