There is now no shortage of media for us to consume, from streaming services and video-on-demand to social media and everything else besides. This has changed the way media scholars think about the production and reception of media. Missing from these conversations, though, is the maker: in particular, the maker who has the power to produce media in their pocket. How might one craft a personal media-making practice that is thoughtful and considerate of the tools and materials at one's disposal? This is the core question of this original new book. Exploring a number of media-making tools and processes like drones and vlogging, as well as thinking through time, editing, sound and the stream, Binns looks out over the current media landscape in order to understand his own media practice. The result is a personal journey through media theory, history and technology, furnished with practical exercises for teachers, students, professionals and enthusiasts: a unique combination of theory and practice written in a highly personal and personable style that is engaging and refreshing. This book will enable readers to understand how a personal creative practice might unlock deeper thinking about media and its place in the world. The primary readership will be among academics, researchers and students in the creative arts, as well as practitioners of creative arts including sound designers, cinematographers and social media content producers. Designed for classroom use, this will be of particular importance for undergraduate students of film production, and may also be of interest to students at MA level, particularly on the growing number of courses that specifically offer a blend of theory and practice. The highly accessible writing style may also mean that it can be taken up for high school courses on film and production. It will also be of interest to academics delivering these courses, and to researchers and scholars of new media and digital cinema.

Considering selected films representing three periods in history - World Wars I and II and their interim, the Vietnam War, and the major conflicts in the Middle East - The Hollywood War Film reflects on Hollywood's representations of war and conflict, in order to map some cinematic discourses therein. This results in an understanding of the Hollywood genre not just as a categorising tool, but rather as a dynamic, inscriptive, iterative cultural phenomenon. Broadly, the thesis of the book is twofold: Firstly, that there are commonalities in Hollywood films representing distinct conflicts and eras, and that recent war films more closely echo early war films in terms of their nationalistic and idealistic perspectives. Secondly, the work proposes a reconfiguring of genre as less concrete and classificatory, and more dynamic and iterative. In doing so, The Hollywood War Film analyses some of the most important war films from the past century, including All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and The Hurt Locker (2009).