About
Dr Michael Franklin is a Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research concentrates on creative industries management, film industry risk, market devices, and data analytics. Within industry, he has worked with British Screen Forum, Film London, Nesta, Sigma Films, and the Sundance Institute. This engaged research with arts bodies and practitioners has been recognised in policy work such as the BFI Commission on UK Independent Film and supported by funders including AHRC, ESRC, TSB, and the Office of the Mayor of London.
Recently, Michael has been a Visiting Fellow of the Columbia Institute of Tele-Information, Columbia University, and is an Affiliated Researcher of the Institute for Capitalising on Creativity, University of St Andrews, where he earned his PhD.
Research
At CRASSH, Michael will examine how competing values and valuation tools are changing the ways creative risk is assessed and balanced in the art of cinema, thus influencing which films are made. Such decisions can have dramatic implications on the impact of film as a public good in its ability to help us engage with the world and each other.
This work aims to develop a framework for conceptualising the complex interplay of incompletely aligned creative drivers, including aesthetics, sustainability, and financial asset exploitation, all of which are interacting during a time of current crisis in the sector. Streaming’s central role in reshaping the construction of audiences, performance, and discoverability has myriad impacts across issues of creative diversity, creator autonomy and cultural sovereignty.
Michael’s research will attend to the resulting socio-technical materialisation of valuation, calculative capacity asymmetries, and efforts to uncover opaque infrastructures of data and knowledge. Through interviews and assessments of data system use in the US, EU and UK, he will analyse such aspects of the highly international and interdependent film business ecosystem.
Select Publications
- Franklin, M. (2022). Risk in the Film Business. ISBN 9780367675301.
- Behrens, R., Foutz, N.Z., Franklin, M., Funk, J., Gutierrez-Navratil, F., Hofmann, J. and Leibfried, U. (2021). Leveraging analytics to produce compelling and profitable film content. Journal of Cultural Economics, 45(2), pp.171-211.
- Franklin, M. (2018). Examining the understanding and management of risk in the film industry. Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, London.
- Campagnolo, G.M., Giannatou, E.,Franklin, M., Stewart, J. and Williams, R. (2018). Revolution remixed? The emergence of Open Content Film-making as a viable component within the mainstream film industry. Information, Communication & Society, 22(13), pp.1871-1888.
- Campagnolo, GM, Giannatou, E., Franklin, M., James Stewart, J. & Williams, R. (2018). Revolution postponed? Tracing the development and limitations of open content filmmaking. Information, Communication & Society, 22(12), pp.1789-1809.
