Randy Astle

For many years Randy has published poetry, fiction, and especially film and cultural criticism. In addition to blogging about children’s media and filmmaking in the 2010s, Randy began writing for Filmmaker magazine in 2011. In the print magazine he’s covered topics like the logistics of releasing films through online VOD platforms, postproduction for interactive films, data visualization and graphic design in documentaries, and how universities and film schools are adapting to teach virtual reality. His online articles emphasize animation, social issue documentaries, postproduction, and especially emerging fields like transmedia, interactive film, installations, and augmented and virtual reality as he’s interviewed filmmakers like Robert Rodriguez, Steven Spielberg’s editor Michael Kahn, and The Lion King producer Don Hahn.

 Sample online articles:

• “New Paths Forward: The Immersive and Interactive Works at Tribeca 2021”

• “Virtual and Actual Realities: The Narrative VR and New Media Works in the Sundance 2021 New Frontier Section”

• “Four Lessons for Filmmakers from Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto”

• “VR.edu”

• “My Favorite Film Screenings of 2017”

• “Animation in 2016: The Year in Review”

With a background in Mormonism, over the past two decades Randy has also helped establish the field of Mormon film studies. He’s published or presented over fifty articles on Mormon cinema, taught and worked at Brigham Young University, created an annual academic forum now over twenty years old, curated film screenings at the Sunstone Symposium at the University of Utah, edited film content for BYU Studies, Irreantum, and Mormon Artist magazine, contributed to books by Praeger and Oxford UP, and published the book Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952, which won the Association for Mormon Letters Award in criticism in 2018. He’s currently writing the sequel to this book, bringing the story up to the present, for which he won a research grant from the B.H. Roberts Foundation and Mormon History Association in June 2023.

Sample online articles:

• “Lands Before Time: Plan of Salvation Typology in the Films of Don Bluth”  Irreantum, 2023

  Nominated for the short form criticism award by the Association for Mormon Letters  

• “Poly-wood! Mormon Polygamy in the Movies”  Sunstone magazine, 2016

• “What Is Mormon Cinema? Defining the Genre”  Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 2009 

• “A History of Mormon Cinema” with Gideon Burton  BYU Studies, 2007

  Named by the editors one of their ten best articles in the journal’s fifty-year history