4 minute read
The Leading Edge
News about happenings in MTSU’s College of Media and Entertainment
Start Your Cameras!
Media Arts students manned cameras, ran video packages, produced audio, and built a stage for a special NTT IndyCar Big Machine Music City Grand Prix last fall in Nashville after rain canceled broadcast of a pit stop competition. And in an ongoing partnership with the Bonnaroo music festival since 2015, the MTSU team handled livestreaming video and audio production for 53 performances from This Tent and That Tent stages for the popular Hulu platform in June.
Featuring the college’s nearly $2 million Mobile Production Lab truck the talented Media Arts Productions crew produces many other live events annually, including MTSU sports for ESPN+, the CMA Awards Red Carpet Special, and more. Bob Gordon, new interim Media Arts chair, serves as executive producer.
“I’ve never seen another school that has such a program,” C3 Presents’ Daniel Gibbs said after Bonnaroo. "It does seem like it is the gold standard.”
Veterans Sharing Stories via Songs
MTSU’s collaboration with Operation Song and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame recently brought together another group of military veterans whose stories need—and deserve—to be told.
Six times since 2016, with the help of professional songwriters and students in MTSU’s Commercial Songwriting program, the veterans’ stories have been turned into songs and performed at the end of the day.
Drawing Animation Acclaim
A film from MTSU’s Animation program—ranked tops in Tennessee and No. 8 for the nation’s Top 25 Animation B.S. programs by Animation Career Review—was awarded Best Animation Comedy at June’s International Student Media Arts Festival in Seoul, South Korea.
Students Dani Oliver, Ashten Royse, Olivia Armstrong, Star Akhom, Allen Marin, and Emily Mishoe created Bubbles, about a social media influencer who is still living in her own bubble, for the festival’s “Climate Change and Cities” theme. MTSU hosted the festival (formerly Wonderful World) in 2023.
Media Arts also recently launched the in-house firm MT Imagine for students to take on animation projects for real-world, paying clients.
Fight Song Harmony
The top-tier Department of Recording Industry helped the Band of Blue produce an updated recording of MTSU’s fight song, as 67 members packed into Media Arts’ Studio One.. A project two decades in the making, it required a lot of technology in a tight one-hour window.
Blues Eye
Photojournalist and alumnus Bill Steber took a visual and interactive journey into the world of Delta blues with his installation last fall at the Baldwin Photographic Gallery on campus.
Steber’s “Deep Roots: Evocations of the Mississippi Blues” featured a collection of images, artifacts, and mixedmedia artwork from his 30-plus-year exploration and documentation of the Mississippi blues culture.
Manifesto Debate
Deborah Fisher, director of the John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Studies at MTSU, talked with the New York Post about the public debate regarding the release of Covenant School shooter Audrey Hale’s manifesto. Additionally, she participated in an interview with LiveNow from Fox on the subject.
Master’s and Majors on the Move
Two proposed media master’s degrees, an M.S. in Digital Media and an M.F.A. in Film and Television, are under development after preliminary approval by the MTSU Board of Trustees.
Recent changes in undergraduate programs include:
• Advertising and Public Relations elevated to a major, with Advertising, Public Relations, and Public Relations-Recording Industry concentrations
• Photography degree now a B.F.A.
• Journalism’s Visual Communication concentration changed to Media Design
