Professor John Ellis
John Ellis is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London and formerly a TV documentary producer from 1982-99. He is chair of the British Universities’ Film and Video Council (BUFVC) and past vice-chair of both the subject association MeCCSA and the producers’ organisation PACT. He has been a visiting professor at Bergen University, Norway. He now leads the ADAPT research project into the history of TV technologies, funded by the European Research Council. He is author of several books including Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation (2012), TV FAQ (2007), Seeing Things (2000) and Visible Fictions (1982), and Language and Materialism (1977, with Rosalind Coward). He has published extensively in Screen, Media Culture and Society and other major journals. His work has been highly influential on the development of media and television studies in the UK, USA and Europe
Dr James Bennett
James Bennett is Reader in Television and Digital Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work focuses on the shape of television and celebrity in digital culture. He has just completed work as Principal Investigator on a 2-year AHRC grant, Multiplatforming Public Service Broadcasting, which examined the role independents and multiplatform productions play in the future of PSB. He is the author of Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen (Routledge, 2010) and the editor (with Niki Strange) of Television as Digital Media (Duke University Press, 2011) and (with Tom Brown) Film & Television After DVD (Routledge, 2008). His work has been published in Screen, Cinema Journal, Convergence, New Review of Film & Television, and Celebrity Studies Journal. He is one of the founding editors of Celebrity Studies Journal, and on the editorial board of Television & New Media.
Dr Nick Hall
Nick Hall is a Research Officer in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. He researches the development of production technologies in television and film and has worked at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum in Exeter. His doctoral thesis examined the development and use of the zoom lens in early post-war American television. His research is published in the collection Television Aesthetics and Style (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and in the forthcoming Companion To Robert Altman (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). He is also preparing a monograph on the history of the zoom lens.
Dr Niki Strange
Niki has spent the last 20 years making, developing, and studying creative media projects and businesses, Starting off within television production for BBC, Channel 4, LWT and US PBS, she moved into digital production in the late 1990s and has since helped develop many creative digital businesses as a mentor and strategist. Most recently she has served as an innovation consultant for Innovate UK (formerly the Technology Strategy Board) and Digital Catapult, curating and hosting a series of events on digital innovation for global brands such as Visa and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Alongside she held a Research Fellowship at University of Sussex from 2008-2014 and has published work on Multiplatform and the UK independent TV and Digital sectors in Television as Digital Media (Duke University Press, 2011, co-edited with Dr James Bennett) and Media Independence (Routledge, 2014, co-edited with Dr James Bennett) as well as a number of journals. Niki is Post-Doctoral Researcher on the Social Media project within ADAPT.
Amanda Murphy
Amanda Murphy was the ADAPT project’s digital producer. She oversaw the planning, shooting, and editing of the reenactments shown in the collection of films on this website.
Amanda is an award-winning television executive producer with a wealth of experience in documentary and in managing projects for multiple markets. She was senior producer of the first UK series of Big Brother, and founding producer of Supernanny both for the UK (Channel 4) and for the United States (ABC).
Amanda is now a senior teaching fellow in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published a video essay “16mm Film Editing: Using Filmed Simulation as a Hands-On Approach to TV History” and is contributing a chapter to the forthcoming book Hands On History (Routledge, expected 2019).
In 2017, Amanda received funding from Royal Holloway’s Humanities and Arts Research Institute (HARI) and the Being Human Festival to work in partnership with the Science Museum Group to take the project live in 2017 to the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford.
Amanda is a visiting mentor and tutor at NFTS and serves on industry award panels including the Royal Television Society.
Rowan Aust
Rowan Aust researches editing technologies for the ADAPT PhD looking into the transition from film editing to digital which has taken place across the television industry in recent decades. Prior to joining ADAPT she worked in television production within both the BBC and the independent sector, specialising in arts news and documentaries.
Tim Heath
Tim Heath researches the development of sound recording technologies and techniques within British television for the ADAPT PhD. Prior to this he completed his masters in sound production for film and television and has worked as a sound recordist/editor for films, theatre and music projects.