The Kinomatics team has recently published two new peer-reviewed articles analysing the role of film schools in structuring film industry collaboration networks.
These two projects evolved independently and were undertaken by different research teams with different national industries as their focus, but both found shared film school affiliations to be an important factor in how film industry networks take shape.
The first paper reports the results of research from Pete Jones, Deb Verhoeven and Alejandro Espinosa-Rada which set out to explore whether filmmakers that worked on the same student film at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) were more likely to work together on an Australian feature film.
To answer this question, the team interoperated the Kinomatics Australian Film Production Dataset with a dataset provided by AFTRS describing student film productions and their personnel each year up to 2014. Using statistical models specially adapted for social network data, the study was able to demonstrate a robust link between AFTRS collaboration and KAFPD collaboration. The paper argues that this has implications for equity policies aiming to disrupt exclusionary collaboration behaviours, as these sticky network ties may already be starting to form before filmmakers even make it to industry.
The second paper written by Elizabeth Prommer, Deb Verhoeven and Skadi Loist uses social network analysis to identify clusters in the German film industry, which were then further evaluated using biographical research. This approach discovered that although women graduate from German film schools at statistically equitable levels, the professional relationships formed between men at film school persist throughout their careers and operate to obstruct women’s opportunities.
Together, these papers highlight the insights that creative, evidence-based approaches to film industry analysis can inspire. Both papers are open access and can be found online here: